For the last year or more, there have been major refurbishments taking place at Kings Cross (and more particularly, at St Pancras where the Eurostar will terminate when the highspeed link is complete). The underground station has been, and still is, going through major renovations, and this week has seen the introduction of new ticket barriers for leaving the station.
What they’ve cleverly managed to do, is make the barriers operate more slowly than they did before, particularly if you live on a non-Oystercard part of the transport network and still have to push your ticket into the slot everyday. This means that with the sparkling new ticket machines, it now takes longer to get through than it did before! Brilliant.
I think the designers are probably the same people who oversaw the introduction of full colour cashpoint machines. Back in ye olden days, you’d pop your card into the green-screened machine, punch your PIN, select cash and, say £30, and get your card and the cash back all within 15 seconds or so. Now the machine munches your card slooooooowwwlllly, serves you a few ads for services you don’t want, spends an age “processing” it, thinks about disgorging the cash and about an hour later you walk away with the money. How can advancements in science slow this process down?
On a completely unrelated subject, I think I saw the strangest street hawker I can remember at the top of the stairs to the entrance of Oxford Circus station this evening. At first I thought he was one of those guys who sell used Travelcards, or maybe he was selling things to put on your mobile phone that light up when it rings. No. He was selling USB Data Drives! In Oxford Street at a tube entrance in a shifty manner. Is this the new version of the knock-off perfume that they used so sell from those brown bakery trays?