On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 05:10:34AM -0700, John B wrote:

...which, by then, they'd realised was the case. I'm not sure what the
"code 30" issue is, but it does mean that an unspecified number of
unfortunate types like yourself need a new physical Oyster card.

But the best thing is that those can only be issued at tube stations,
which sucks if you live in Croydon and only use Oyster for local buses.
Such people have to either say bye-bye to whatever credit was left on
their now broken card, or make a special journey, paying the cash
penalty fare, to a tube station (see the fifth paragraph he
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/news/oyster.aspx).

More proof, not that we needed it, that Oyster was never thought out
properly and that people living in south London don't matter to TfL's
management. A well-designed system fails gracefully. Oyster doesn't.

I'm not sure what the legal rather than practical situation is, but
I'd be amazed if it were different - LUL staff aren't really trained
in the mysterious vagaries of National Rail, and don't tend to have a
clue about Gold Cards, Network Cards, etc.

Perhaps they should be, if they're going to try to do stuff with
National Rail tickets. And vice versa, of course.

--
David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive

Perl: the only language that makes Welsh look acceptable