The other day as I was making my way to work I had a slight spot of oyster bother. It seemed that there was some trouble reading my card. Beep beep beep but no joy, eventually however the barriers deigned to do a red sea and part for me thus giving me access to the wonderful tube network.
I sat there trying to read my book, whilst listening to some hag twitter away on her mobile chatter box about some crap or other, waiting to pull into white city, which in time is just what the train did. Joy, work beckons.
I drift up the stairs and get to the barrier and once again it beeps in an error style noise, well this is annoying, maybe I should take card from my wallet and try aga….
SNATCH
What the fuck, some tube worker has stolen my wallet. With it firmly grasped in their greasy thieving mits they are jabbing it repeatedly on the sensor. I later learn, whilst drunk and tired and fantastically annoyed by the inconvenience of not being allowed to get home without a verbal sparing session with a tube based ticket man, that she was using up all my credit by touching my card out repeatedly, which was nice. She waves me through, finally giving back my now much flatter wallet. I’m mildly annoyed but work is moments away which is always a happy event so I head off a full bout of rage.
Over the next few days I keep having problems, I get various tube urchins to check the card, nothing wrong, it works fine out of the wallet but not in. Maybe I have some lead money I got from somewhere shielding the sensor, who knows but it’s getting very annoying.
Then today I was gliding down an escalator on my way back from Bournemouth and see an advert, for a Barclaycard, with a built in oyster card… That’s fine, it’s a blisteringly stupid idea but hey not my problem, I don’t have a Barclaycard. Only I vaugly remember that my credit card company were recently taken over (apparently there is some financial crisis at the moment) and I got a new card, a Barclaycard as it turns out, but not an oyster one surely, I would never ask for that… Only on closer inspection it is. The bastards have sent me an oyster credit card without telling me that it’s one and have caused a fucking week of me being that wanker at the barriers holding everyone up due to dual card interference.
The rage inducing realisation of this topped off a nice day of rage.
For earlier I tried to watch a film whilst on the aforementioned train back from Bournemouth, a UMD (Unbelievably Massive Disappointment is probably what it should stand for) on my PSP. A film that I bought some 2 years ago because it was very cheap, in a soon to be closed down shop. I was really looking forward to it, it was Donnie Darko, it’s a great film, I’d seen it before but not this particular copy. It’s a film that does, as far as I know, not star Al Pachino… Or Jonny Depp. It’s not about mobsters either… So why are all these things turning up on my tiny portable screen? I’ll tell you why, because some twunt somewhere had got confused between Donnie Darco and Donnie Brasco and put the disk of one in the innards and case of the other. I did not want to watch Brasco at this moment but that’s all I had… Forget about it…