Mizter T wrote:

"George" wrote:


A husband and wife go out for the day and make various journies
throughout the day, despite the fact that they have bothed touched in
and out and the same locations they have both had vastly different
amounts deducted from their cards.

That's simply not possible - if any two cards are touched in and out at the
same places then the exact same thing will happen to both of them -
computers are like that, as much as people might like to think that things
are happening randomly they are not.

Oh, come on. This is Oyster. Computers aren't the only part of the
hardware. There are plenty of other things to go wrong.

In my experience, there seem to be faulty pads out there, that read
the card and open the gate, but don't always manage to write back to
the card saying the journey is completed. Sometimes they do managed
it, sometimes they don't. (It's either that or I've got a faulty card
that doesn't always like being written to.)

If that happened to the husband but not the wife (or vice versa) then
that could explain the difference.


One particular thing I've seen many people doing is trying to touch-out or
touch-in on the wrong Oyster pads at station gatelines, where those
gatelines are unattended and hence left open - i.e. people leaving the
station don't look for the green arrow light to indicate that the gate is an
exit gate and instead try to touch-out on the inactive Oyster pad on the
wrong side of an entry gate is (or vice versa for people entering a station
and trying to use an inactive Oyster pad on an exit gate) - also people
walking through open gates before then remembering they need to touch-out,
but instead touching-in on Oyster pads on entry gates. Part of the problem
here can be that the lights on the gate's PED unit (? - it stands for
something that I can't recall off-hand) are sometimes rather faint.

Very good point.

I also got confused the first time I tried to for a journey from
Sydenham Hill to Bromley South.

Touched in on the readers by the Sydenham Hill station entrance on the
up platform, crossed the footbridge to the down platform, saw some
more readers, thought "Better touch on one of those too, so the system
knows which direction I'm going in and doesn't get confused by the
fact that I touched in on one platform and then caught a train from
the other one." Big mistake!