A Farce - in the theatre and the station.

JR and I had a night on the town. This is a fairly infrequent happening, and I can only be lured out with a some sort of special offer eg free movie, or in this case, a theatre production costing peanuts. One of our lovely theatres does 'preview' nights, and if you're in quick, months ahead, you can procure a ticket for £5 and get the best seats in the house.

Usually, at that price, if it's not to your liking, you can a) leave at the interval or b) snooze quietly. But last night there was to be no leaving or snoozing. You couldn't have slept for the laughter. Yes, it was what I believe is called a 'farce' - not normally something I'd be queuing up for. It was called The Marriage of Figaro, and it was not what you'd assume from that title, but there was some opera singing in it. It was brilliant.

We had also ventured into a restaurant chain which specialises in noodles and only gives you chopsticks for utensils. The last one of this chain we'd been in was in Sydney, on the waterfront, in the (warm) winter. We so enjoyed that memory (at least 20 years ago) that we were loathe to sample the chain again lest we were disappointed. I know the marketing folk wouldn't want to hear that kind reasoning! But we were not disappointed. Although not quite the balmy watery view of the former, the great service, lovely food and lack of muzak made up for it.

Yesterday I had a officious email to say that I had bought rail tickets from Hove to London and back (true), but that the card I'd bought them on was due to run out before I picked them up at Hove Station next week. Well, the card says the expiry date is 04/12. The END of. But the computer maybe doesn't understand the words, specialising in numbers. And you can't argue with a computer once it's made its mind up.

So today we went to Waverley Station and I took advantage of the crowds to take photos of strangers, and not to pay them. Wanted to get the lovely ceiling in too. Also had a wee ride on the new escalator, which was working today. Now THAT is a big improvement!

We located a ticket machine and readied ourselves to follow the instructions to retrieve the tickets. Easy enough, I hear you say... I put the card in, finger ready to type in the Very Important 10 digit 'Collection Reference Number', but it just said 'TAKE YOUR CARD OUT'. Well, it didn't actually say that- it was on the screen. I took it out and tried again. Same thing. Went to another machine of a different colour, same thing. Tried a couple more machines before resorting to a human.

The human took the card and declared that it was 'empty'. Was that the card I had used to purchase the tickets? Yes. She tried again, asked if we'd been on any machines, and then said that it had been 'ticketed'. We had to rush back to the original machine - fortunately nobody else had used it meantime - and there they were - dropped into the wee shelf thing at the bottom. There had been no mention of 'Please pick up your tickets. Look! They are in the wee shelf thing at the bottom.' AND it hadn't even wanted the Very Important 10 digit 'Collection Reference Number'.

Isn't technology wonderful?