Bagel Belly Blog

No escape

I had a cunning plan to sneak back to Norwich tonight, to pick up some paperwork, water the plants, and so on. Unfortunately our great rail network had other plans:

"Operating incident", I was reliably informed by the guy at the ticket office (who amazingly unquestioningly refunded my ticket), is a euphamism for "some guy drove a lorry into the new bridge outside the station".

Figuring the packed tube to Stratford and onward trains would be a living hell, I decided to abandon my trip. The last diversion "via Stratford" took almost four hours to complete, and I really didn't fancy arriving at nearly midnight only to get up again at 5am.

Checking the various rail websites it seems the "operating incident" is still a problem:

Hurrah for the British transport network.

Update: Turns out it wasn't a lorry, but the muppets at Network Rail shuffling the bridge around while trains ran underneath. See Seconds from Disaster: Thousands stranded as rail bridge collapses.

Technorati Tags: accident, life, london, b0rkb0rkb0rk, trains, transport, uk

Unusual praise

So there I was, booking tickets via the Eurostar website, which was running horribly slowly and also failing to let me pick my seats, since the shiny website update they just did including seat selection does not work in Safari. I was muttering and cursing as it was a sunny Saturday morning and I really wanted to be outside, not stuck inside fighting with a computer again.

Travel times chosen, seats not selected, and personal details entered, and then my credit card was declined. Damnit, I thought, that's all I need, now I'm going to have to speak to the bank and find out what's wrong this time. Oh, and now my mobile is ringing, who the hell wants to speak to me and if this website session times out I'm going to be really annoyed.

And then I answered the phone, and it turns out it was the bank, calling because in the last three days they'd seen some unusual behaviour on my card. Was I renting an apartment in Bayswater? Yes. Was I buying flowers in Spain? Yes. Was I buying dinner in Brussels? Yes. And sir, how about Eurostar - did you just try to book that too? Yes!

It's nice to see the bank being so proactive. And my session didn't time out, and my card went through fine the second time around, and so I will be able to take the train back to Brussels on Friday night. All is good with the world.

I was reminded of this whilst reading Fraud.

Technorati Tags: banks, creditcards, fraud, purchasing