Non-Londoners amongst you might be a bit confused by this, so bear with me... for travel around the Capital, we used a very tech little magnetic pass called the Oyster. It looks like this:



The concept is fairly straightforward. You load money (or season tickets) on to the card over the Internet or through serving machines at stations, the card keeps track of your travels and deducts cash as necessary, and fines you on the spot and bars you from entering barriers at stations if you do anything it thinks is especially wrong. All you have to do to is place it on the barrier at the beginning and end of every journey, and (in theory, at least) the barrier should swing sweetly open to let you go if you've been an honest boy and paid up for your fare. "Smart", you might think, "and interesting! I'll have one, please!"

The trouble is (and you surely knew I was going to say this) the system is far from perfect. Some National Railway Stations don't have Oyster compatible barriers, for example, and therefore you are forbidden to use them if you carry the card and must instead buy more expensive paper tickets. Often you won't realise that the station doesn't have an Oyster compatible barrier until you arrive there, see it for yourself, and some irate and unreasonable official fines you for making an "incomplete journey". So really, the whole thing is bollocks, in short. A perfectly good idea spoiled by naff or incomplete execution - put a local authority in charge of rolling out anything so complex in England, and you'll find this kind of thing happens often.

To add to the list of difficulties, like any computerised system with stupid or inefficient humans at the helm, it is prone to glitches. Once when I was away in Australia I was recorded as having made an invalid journey somewhere near the Tower of London. I was let off my fine when I told the railway official that I could quite happily produce a passport stamp proving that I wasn't even in the same hemisphere at the time of the supposed trip, much less the same city.

A similar situation occurred on Friday night. I placed my Oyster Card over the ticket barrier, and it bleeped and whined at me about an invalid journey. I went to the top-up machine to see what happened, and it told me that I had made an illegal journey on Sunday 11 March. A journey two days into the future. Either I had just travelled forwards in time, or something had gone horribly wrong. In a rush to get home, I decided I'd go to the station the next day to resolve it instead, mindful of the fact that numerous other people must have been in the same position.

Except no. I arrived at Walthamstow Central station today to be greeted by the most arrogant, obnoxious bunch of arseholes I've come across in a long while.

"Nuffing wrong with our ticket barriers!" snapped a woman angrily. "If it says you've made an incomplete journey, you've made an incomplete journey!"
"No, you don't understand," I tried to explain politely, "it's saying I made an invalid journey tomorrow"
"That can't be, it's what you did yesterday," she replied huffily.
"No, it's not. It's recorded on the system as a journey that occurred tomorrow."
"Nuffing wrong with our ticket barriers!" she repeated, in a manner that clearly suggested "You're either an idiot or a thief, and in either case I can't be bothered to stand here listening to your nonsense".

After I argued with her some more, one of her junior members of staff agreed, with an exasperated expression, to show me how wrong I was by taking up the stairs to go to the ticket machine, where I could show her my Oyster journey data and she could prove to me that I was being stupid. "I'll show you what you've done wrong!" she said triumphantly.

So we went up to the machine. We looked at my journey data. There it said, very clearly again, that I was guilty of making an illegal journey that occurred tomorrow. It looked something like this:

Sunday 11 March 18:35pm - ARRIVED - WALTHAMSTOW CENTRAL - INCOMPLETE JOURNEY!
Friday 9 March - 18:00pm - LEFT - CAMDEN TOWN - INCOMPLETE JOURNEY!

I hope the brighter readers amongst you will be able to spot the obvious error in the above. Look at the journey times. Look at the dates. Can you see what happened?

"How can this be?" I asked, pointing to the data before our eyes.
The young girl didn't really understand, and pointed at the red text at the bottom of the screen.
"Incomplete journey!" she yelled triumphantly. "You didn't touch out at the ticket barrier!"
"Yes, but you see, it says here that I didn't touch out of the ticket barrier tomorrow. Tomorrow hasn't happened yet."
I was sure my steely logic would win through.
"That doesn't matter!" she replied. "Incomplete journey!"
"A journey which hasn't happened yet!" I repeated.
"INCOMPLETE JOURNEY!" she literally yelled back at me, stabbing at the screen, at which point I'm ashamed to confess I lost my cool.
"LISTEN," I replied, "JUST LISTEN TO ME FOR A MINUTE. HOW THE HELL CAN I BE FINED FOR A JOURNEY WHICH HASN'T EVEN BEEN MADE YET?"
"Well, the date's wrong, but maybe you just didn't touch out yesterday!" she replied, looking more pleased with herself. "It's still an incomplete journey!"
"But I did touch out yesterday!" I yelled. "And it's come out as tomorrow's date. Can you not see that?"
I was about to argue back some more, but at this point a blank-eyed, slack-jawed young teenager approached myself and Amanda after hearing all the shouting and got excited, hoping he could start a fight, or, more likely, start a violent attack with minimal resistance, which is what I find bored teenagers are usually interested in rather than "fights" as such. "What's all the fighting about, what are you causing a fucking scene for?" he leered.
I forget the reason he went off yelling that Amanda should "fuck off back" to "her own fucking country", but I think it was probably due to something we said in reply to his threats which was along the lines of "shut up and go away".
Shortly after this, the young railway assistant confessed that she couldn't help us anyway, since the ticket office was closed, and that we'd have to go to the next station to get the Oyster Card checked. It would seem she only took me to the Oyster Machine to show me what a silly man I was. Which was handy, given the fact that I had an appointment to keep.

At the next station on our journey (Victoria) the queue to deal with Oyster Cards was at least fifteen minutes long, being packed with tourists and out-of-towners staring at them in a confused way, for which I can hardly blame them. I was starting to get confused myself. I was beginning to believe that I had indeed travelled forward in time on one of them, and that it was like some episode of Doctor Who, where an alien enemy had brainwashed an entire staff-force to believe that there was a giant Oyster Robot who could not be argued with. All attempts to dispute the beast's version of travel events resulted in them screaming about blasphemy. "YOU CANNOT QUESTION THE VERDICT OF THE OY-STEER!" they all appeared to yell.

It didn't surprise me when fifteen minutes later I got to the front of the queue to be greeted by a wrinkly faced woman with a sour, thin-lipped expression who seemed equally sceptical about my version of events. I tried to calmly, politely explain the situation to her.
"Look, I've had terrible trouble with this," I said slowly. "There's something wrong with my card. It says I made an illegal journey tomorrow".
She looked at me doubtfully, then swiped my card and looked at the data on screen.
"You," she said firmly and slowly, with much emphasis on the relevant words in case I was too stupid to understand, "made an incomplete journey on SUNDAY the 11th March!" then looked at me triumphantly. "I've caught a liar and a thief!" her expression seemed to say.
"There's just one small problem with that," I said. "Sunday 11th March hasn't happened yet, you see".
That threw her. She slowly looked at the screen, at me, at the Oyster card, then back at the screen again. She repeated this a second time. I think if I'd told her that I was the reincarnation of Jesus she'd have taken my statement with less doubt. However, she chewed on the data for awhile, decided it was inarguable, then came up with the "answer".
"Well then," she said. "This just isn't possible. So it would seem to me that you made an illegal journey on the 11 March last year!"
"Hang on," I said, not unreasonably. "Are you honestly telling me that I've been walking around using an invalid card for the last year that has been programmed not to let me through any barriers because I was fined on 11 March 2006? How could that be possible? Surely you can see the rest of my journey history?"
She thought about that for a few moments as well, then sighed, thinned her lips again, made a few adjustments I couldn't see, then slammed the card back on the desk in front of me which made a slapping noise as it hit the metal of the serving shelf.
"Your card has been restored," she snapped. "You now have travelcard status back again and should be able to go through barriers. It expires tonight, do you understand? And I don't understand how all this happened."
"No," I replied in a very bitter voice, staring at her, "and nor the hell do I".
I waited for an apology. None came. It was like being in a court in Scotland and being given a "Not Proven" verdict rather than a "Not Guilty" one.

It's strange to say it given that really this was more of a petty dispute than anything serious, but the sequence of arguments I've had has faintly depressed me all day. It's more teeth-grindingly annoying to be told you're a liar by one idiot after another than I can verbalise. Please Ken, can you not just replace the present sack of useless, jumped-up cashiers with some immigrants? They'd be much more polite.

Still, I can declare it's official. You'll never get your incorrect fine money back off the London Underground without a fight. They'd even sooner believe you time-travelled an illegal journey.