terrible train ticket

The other evening I sat down in front of the computer to book train tickets up north, as I was planning to visit my father. I booked a ticket for the 2nd March and emailed the confirmation to my dad to show him the dates.


On Monday evening he phoned me and asked me what I wanted to eat on my arrival, to which I snapped a bit.

“Surely we’ll have time to discuss that closer to the date” I snarled.

“But it is only 2 days away until you arrive?” he said, rather confused.

I checked my email confirmation and sure – I’d booked the ticket for the 2nd February instead of 2nd March. I tried to rebook the tickets, but wasn’t allowed. I tried to get a refund. I wasn’t allowed. I asked customer support if I could sell my tickets on eBay and let the buyer change the name of the ticket. Nope, no, niet, bugger nothing.

On Tuesday morning I reschedualed all my meetings for the week, cancelled appointments and made room for a visit up north a month sooner than I’d originally planned. It was doable, however I had to work my arse off all Tuesday to make it so.

After a long day at work myself and the Mr. went to the pictures to see a preview of “The King’s speech”. Back home late in the evening I treated myself to a glass of wine and chilled.

…When it hit me. The tickets! I needed to print out the tickets from the internet! Bollox. The train was due to leave 7.20 am the following morning and there was no chance I’d manage to print them off anywhere before then.

I phoned customer services who were closed for the day. So I got up at 5.30 am on Tuesday, phoned them and explained my predicament.

“No problem” a very friendly voice said to me. “I’ll change it on the computer so that you can collect the tickets at the train station”. He gave me a booking number and off I went to the station.

Standing by the ticket machine I typed in the booking number several times without receiving anything but a message on the screen saying “no tickets found on this number”. I went to the customer service desk and waited in the queue for a good 15 minutes before I could explain my dilemma for the woman at the desk.

“Ooops”, she said whilst looking at her computer screen. “He must’ve clicked on the wrong button when he tried to help you over the phone this morning. Your ticket is gone”.

With 6 minutes to spare before the train would leave the station I nearly cried. The woman at the desk quickly wrote a few lines on a piece of paper, signed it and gave to me. “Give this to the train host and you’ll be fine”.

So I legged it to the train and made it with a minute to spare befoe departure. The train host accepted my piece of paper. So really I should be happy. But truth be told I’m sick and tired of things not ever going smoothly. And there was no tea on the train either.