On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 18:18 +0100 (BST), Colin Rosenstiel wrote:

I had a similar experience recently. I entered a Tube station using
PAYG. While waiting for my train, I received a mobile phone call,
telling me I no longer needed to make the journey. I returned to the
barriers and went to the assistance window, to get the journey I'd
started cancelled. I described the situation to the ticket office
clerk. He explained that he wasn't permitted to do anything to do
with Oyster cards, as it was outside ticket office opening hours, and
that I would have to come back when it was open to get the journey taken
off the card (this was at a small station where the ticket office is
only open for a few hours each weekday, and closed all weekend). To
provide me with evidence, he then wrote an entry in the station
log-book describing my predicament. (Of course, all this took much
longer than simply cancelling the journey on the card would have
done.)

On the plus side, when I stopped at the ticket window of another
station a couple of days later to try and get the journey removed,
the clerk was so swift and efficient that he'd done it before I'd even
finished explaining what had happened...

That sort of problem wouldn't have been so easy to resolve with a paper
ticket of course.

Actually, a few years ago I bought a Travelcard from a Tube ticket
machine, realised it would have been cheaper to buy singles, took it
to the ticket window, and they refunded it straight away. (I hadn't
been through the barriers with it, though, and I suppose if the ticket
office had been closed I'd have had to just take the loss.)

But anyway, you can't get penalised £4 if you buy a paper ticket you
find you don't need.