At start of traffic on Saturday all Oyster readers clapped out. The whole lot of them - Underground, Overground, DLR, buses, national rail. Why? Because of "a corrupt electronic file being included within the overnight update."
The upshot? Every single Oyster card that touched in from start of traffic until 0930 was hotlisted and permanently knackered. Probably 100,000 Oyster cards were affected.
First problem for staff - this includes your staff pass. If you were up and about on Saturday morning - perhaps going home from a night turn, going in to an early turn, or just going about your personal life, that's your staff pass rendered useless.
Second problem for staff - understandably frustrated and annoyed passengers (no point LUL calling them 'customers' when they have just destroyed their 'product'), a huge extra workload and a fair bit of grief.
Never mind, eh? Management came to the rescue with a shedload of thingies we could try in order to help people out, depending on what type of card it was, whether the TOM could read it, and what the passenger tells you was on the card. And if all else fails - which it usually does - there is always the Customer Service Centre: good luck waiting for the phone to be answered.
Most ironically, the company advised us to direct passengers to their nearest ticket office to resolve their problem. Good job they didn't go ahead with those wholesale closures then, eh? As it was, some ticket offices had to stay open longer than their advertised hours.
Anyone would conclude that although new technology is a good thing, it isn't failsafe, so having human beings there is a good idea. Technology such as Oyster should supplement staff, not replace us.
