For the past year or so I have been getting Travel Warrants from work to
exchange for One-Day Travelcards (zones 1-6) for my travel into London
from the suburbs for work matters.

For most of the year I knew the dates I'd be travelling well in advance
so would typically get warrants for all the dates for a whole month
(about seven dates, usually), then take them to my local station and
exchange them all there and then.

All worked well, until today, when I visited my local Southeastern
station and asked a staff member I hadn't seen before to do me a couple
of tickets, one for next week and one for the week after. He insisted
that he couldn't issue One-Day Travelcards more than a week in advance,
so I'd have to come back for the second one next week.

I explained that no-one had ever said this before and I'd been happily
claiming them in advance for a year, and he just responded that he would
report this to the head office in that case so that the staff
responsible would be reprimanded! He was, as you may have gathered, a
charming man.

But was he right? Can all the staff at not just my local station but
also the other couple of stations I used on occasion to claim my tickets
have been wrong for all this time, and this one man right? And if he is
right, why do Southeastern's systems let them issue One-Day Travelcards
more than a *month* in advance? (I claimed 9 December on about
1 November.)

If it's true then it seems a strange rule, anyway, as the tickets
clearly show the date of validity on them, so I'm hardly going to get
away with using it on a different date.

He didn't want to engage in conversation about it though and just
answered whatever I said with the repeated point that it was a "London
Transport" (sic) product so it was nothing to do with him.

Whether he's right or not I rather hope he was only in my station for a
one-day stand-in!

Thanks for any light you can shed,

Paul