Thursday, November 03, 2016

Ticket Glitches

"No good!" the conductor, who looked like he should be a loving grandfather except for the scowl and growl, told us.

He waved our printed A4 on-line purchased tickets at us.

"No good" seemed to be his only English. He didn't speak French. My German "warum?" brought another "no good."

We were on a Czech train from Berlin to Prague. I knew the ups and downs of the Swiss, English German and French train systems. Example in France, you have to stamp your ticket in a yellow machine before getting on the train. Czech trains were new.

It was the second glitch. For a moment we thought we had lost the paper copies but found them. At least they were on  Rick's phone and laptop assuming we could get signals and bars.

Rick brought up the ticket which he'd saved in PDF. "No good!" the conductor said looking at the screen.

Eventually we realized there was no QR code on screen or on paper.

We bought two new tickets, not exorbitant by Swiss standards but annoying, and went on to enjoy the meals at our seats and the scenery.

On the other side of the border we realized that our tickets only went to Dresden.

Rick went to the original on-line tickets and voilà there was the QR code.

Good thing.

A second conductor came by. This was a pretty young red-head that had trouble keeping a smile from her lips.

Why the code didn't print I have no idea.

Even if almost every paper I own is on my laptop, key and cloud, l am as close to paper-free as possible in my life,  I still don't trust electronic devises for things like tickets. I imagine getting to an airport to use my phone and getting no bars as happens much too often.

I trust the incompetence of others and systems to cause problems.

None of this will make any difference to our holiday in Prague.

Just glitches that have been solved.








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