ni.chol.as

[ Two days ago... ]

I have been encouraged out of London this weekend by the promises of a knee-slapping night out at a Liverpudlian rock club as a means to a housewarming of friends Seth and Gareth. Unfortunately, travel outside of this hallowed city, rare as it is, requires use of one of the many varying methods of brain-paralysingly shit public transport options. The unifying feature of any of them is that they will only get you to your destination if you are willing to take on the hordes of telephone operators chained to their desks in foreign call centres whose sole job in life is to do their utmost to ruin your weekend. To wit:

Dearest Polly booked Rob and I a pair of return tickets using well known internet bastards Trainfuckers.com, or something. It’s the one everyone has to use. Even if you don’t use them, you’re still really using them. All the other websites use the Trainfuckers database and arse-handed booking processes. The reason Polly booked the tickets was because the website was entirely broken for me and when it did work, it showed my different prices to the ones Polly was seeing. In the end, Polly was able to get on and book the cheapest tickets. No worries, though, all she needs to do is give us our booking code and we collect the tickets automagically at the station.

This would have been fine, but she booked the wrong day for us to travel up. It’s ok though, we live in the future where such mistakes are expected and easily rectified! A short telephone call to a friendly customer service rep and it’ll be all sorted out with smiles all round. Cough. Three phone calls to dour ignorant numbnuts left me wondering if they are adding some chemical to the water in Bangalore that leaves you incoherent and inexplicably rude. After convincing them that I was indeed the cardholder for the booking and having had Polly phone them up to this effect, they finally saw sense and we were in possession of a seemingly correct booking for a return ticket to Liverpool.

I arrived at the station today and punched in my reference code on a machine to retrieve the tickets. The machine did the polite machine equivalent of laughing callously in my face and told me to bugger off. I put in another code and it was sensible enough to dispatch me at least our tickets from London to Liverpool. I went to speak to a customer services person for Virgin Trains to explain my problem. She was reading the Sun on a chair behind a pedestal and actually said “Yes, can I help you?” whilst idly finishing off an article about the emergent Home Counties dogging scene on page 2.

All that foul inattentive woman could manage was to telephone Trainfuckers on my behalf then thrust the handset towards my head just as the agent on the other end picked up. The agents best advice, “Speak to someone at the train station”. My “But… but!” was rendered onto deaf ears and then a dial tone.

So at the moment, I’m on a train to Liverpool with no ticket back and only the word of a twisted and broken computer system guarded by beings from another continent to prove that I’ve got some right to return to London on Sunday evening. If I spend more than two days out of London, things tend to get desperate. I turn into a terrible creature without access to 24 hour delivery food or incompetent terrorists. For now, the only thing is to enjoy the ride, which entails a swift judicious trip to Car C, wherein lies the key to enjoying a city like Liverpool. Large quantities of beer… oh shit. I just got back from Coach C with terrible news. The shop is shut. This train is dry.