Transport of not much delight
Published: 02 Oct 2003 10:55 BST
Perhaps I missed a briefing. It happens. There must have been a press release I binned two paragraphs too early, a broadcast to the nation I slept through. I'm obviously not up to speed here: the plot has been lost, the clue not got and the barbeque under-catered to the tune of one or more prawns. For the past twenty years, I have been labouring under an enormous misapprehension -- that IT is supposed to make my life easier.
For example. This week, I signed up for a major IT-based initiative and bought an Oyster card. This is a brand new scheme for travel on London's public transport network -- a contactless smart card that holds all your details and gives you access to the underground and overground trains, buses and trams that hold the capital together. Before Oyster, you bought a season ticket that had a magnetic stripe on the back and printing on the front: bus drivers and ticket inspectors read the front bit, automatic entry gates scanned the back bit, and between them they let you on.
Now, you just wave your Oyster in the vicinity of a big yellow sensor on buses and at stations and off you go. The whole scheme is knitted together by computers: you can do clever things like pay for your journeys over the Internet, recharge your card at kiosks and, er, feel smug as you sail through ticket barriers without taking your card out of its holder. A great leap forward for commuterkind, or so it's been sold.
The trouble is, the card has no printing. Anyone who wants to know what's in the card and doesn't have a reader -- like a lot of people at train stations, or people you need to talk to about your lost card over the telephone -- is not going to be able to help you. So, whenever you buy or recharge an Oyster card, you also get a little printed slip the exact same size and shape as an old fashioned ticket which confirms what you've paid for. This you have to show or read out over the telephone when you're buying an extra journey or explaining that you've lost your card: obviously, if you need it to cope with a lost card, you mustn't keep it with the card itself. But if you need it to buy an extended journey, you must have it to hand together with the Oyster. So you have to have it about your person, just not in the same holder. Woe betide you if you lose it. And more woe if you lose the Oyster. That's two things to lose instead of one, for no noticeable benefit. You see why I'm a bit puzzled.
The same feeling of befuddlement hit me a few months back, when I upgraded my old-style driving licence for a brand-new computerised one. The old one was a large sheet of paper carrying all manner of information -- what I was allowed to drive, when the licence ran out, evidence of naughtiness concerning speeding, and all that sort of thing. The new one is a credit-card sized piece of plastic with my digitised picture on, but no room for much of the rest of the information. That comes on a separate piece of paper called the counterpart. Which -- ah, you're ahead of me here -- you must keep separately from the main licence, except for when you mustn't. Hiring a car? You need the counterpart, so the hirer can check you're not some manic speed freak just one breath away from disqualification. Need to prove to the police that you're duly authorised to operate the automobile in which you've just been stopped? The card will do. Two things to lose instead of one.
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