Rage rising.... red mist descending...

[glenatron]

Yes, it's a chance to enjoy more of that timeless comedy classic: Glenatron vs the rail system. Recalling classic past episodes such as "the one where Glenatron was reduced to flinging his bicycle down the platform in inexpressible rage", "the unbearable confusingness of trying to plan a complex journey through a call centre in India" and "Oh my god what do you mean I had to know those codes I was given six weeks ago when I booked? Why wasn't I told? It's only five minutes until the sodding train goes" today's is entitled "no, seriously Virgin Trains, wtf???"

It began innocently enough with me checking the train times for a trip to the office at the end of the week. The Office is in Stockport, so it's preferable to rail than drive, especially if work are paying and they're happy for you to go first class. I amble through the rail timetables until it comes time to buy a ticket. But wait, there is no "buy a ticket" link. Why is there no "buy a ticket" link? I have no idea, but my assumption is that because of the inspired idea that having a bunch of powerless companies who can put their branding on trains and offer no benefits to the customer (or rail privatisation as Conservatives and Gordon "duuuh hey boss lets do the same thing with Transport for London" Brown might refer to it) would make a few old school ties very rich, Network Rail aren't allowed to pretend they do anything. Well, nothing apart from changing their name whenever their corner-cutting cheapskate contractors kill a bunch of punters through their dire and culpable incompetence anyways. So I can't go directly from the timetable and find somewhere to buy tickets. That's fine, I'll try a couple of the operators- Virgin trains run the thing so they should be able to do me a good deal...

I have just written them an email. Here it is:

Dear Virgin sales folk.

You have the worst web site I have ever used. I have used many terrible terrible web sites but I swear yours was the worst one by a broad margin. I can see from looking at various sites that all online rail ticket sellers are basically pimping the same application with a slightly different design wrapped round it- from the looks of it you're not able to offer anything remotely different; not so much as a price difference between you- just a simple reselling of the standard service.

In the light of this, I am astounded by how you have managed to get it so wrong. I mean, yes the application is bad for everyone, but somehow Virgin have made it endlessly worse. Aside from the bizarrely twisted and labyrinthine process required to find the ticket and the fact that there are many different tarriffs I might want to take and the incomprehensible fact that single tickets are cheaper than return ones even if I'm aiming to take the return on the same train at the same time as the two singles. It must have been a joyous night in the railway franchise crackhouse when you thought that one up. Aside from all of that, I was amazed to find that having chosen my route, chosen my ticket (from the second page of cheap single tickets that are cheaper than returns), given you my details to set up an account, gone back and chosen my ticket again because at that point I had to, confirmed that was the route I wanted and those were the two single tickets I wanted and confirmed I wanted to collect the ticket from the happy ticket machine or whatever the infernal device of ticket provision is named. Having gone through all that, I found myself back at the timetable page being asked where I wanted to go from and to. "Wait," I thought, "Surely I have become somehow intoxicated by the rush of power that purchasing a ticket in slow motion over nine hundred steps provides me with and clicked the wrong button." So once again I confirmed the route, double confirmed the route ignoring advertisements for conveniently placed hotels, taxi ranks and hobos, said I wanted to collect my tickets from the damnation dispenser on Euston station and carefully clicked on "Continue". Back to the Journey planning page asking where I wanted to go and when I wanted to go there.

"Silly me," I thought, "I must be going round in circles picking the same ticket again and again, so I clicked on my Basket and it showed me... the Journey Planner page. Clicked on my account. Signed in again. Clicked on "My Account." Nothing. Your stupid site was just sending me round in endless circles.

The story does have a happy ending, you'll be reassured to hear. In spite of mostly being a different design over the same user-hostile pages, GNER were able to sell me the same tickets for the same money and let me get to a checkout and pay for them.

I am a very experienced programmer and web professional so if I can't use your site I can guarantee you those with less expertise will find it even more confusing. My recommendation for an appropriate course of action would be to employ me as head of your web department for one day so I could fire every single person there. Then transfer me to HR so I could give them jobs again and transfer me back to the web department so I could fire them all for a second time. I just can't see how firing them only once would be enough for them to truly understand their own incompetence.

Actually, that's not quite fair. I would fire them once and only let them have their jobs back if they could use their own system to book the train ticket for their next day's journey to work. I feel you could be entirely confident you would never have to see their irritating, stupid "I did a night class in HTML so I'm a web programmer, right?" faces ever again.

Yours in heartfelt sincerity,

Glenatron