First Capital Connect

Dear Sir or Madman,

I’m not much of a complainer. Indeed, being rather stuffily British I tend, when faced with a customer service problem, to grit my teeth, try to cope, and, if pressed, will generally do little worse than make a sarcastic or faintly patronising comment or two under my breath before trying to forget the whole thing ever happened.

You, as a representative of a rail company, are presumably regularly inundated with complaints, and will take no pleasure in reading yet another one. But there are times when nothing short of a rant will assuage the frothing cauldron of irritation in your brain, so I ask you to indulge me, if you would.

If, however, you’d only like the pertinent part of this complaint, do skip to the last couple of paragraphs.

Rail travel is often annoying. Everyone knows this. Things go wrong, there are delays and cancellations, there are engineering works and rail replacement bus services: these are all things one has to accept. The one thing I don’t count on, however, is not being able to get a ticket in the first place.

My girlfriend bought two return tickets from King’s Cross to Huntingdon online using her credit card – one for her and one for me – for a Bank Holiday weekend visit to her parents. She travelled up on the Friday, I was to join her on the Saturday. All easy enough so far. Unfortunately, my tickets were lost in the post, and so, as advised to do in such an event, I telephoned the number given in the booking confirmation email. I spoke to a very pleasant and helpful woman who informed me that I’d be able to collect my tickets from the ticket office at King’s Cross if I had the booking number and some ID. Easy enough, I thought.

I was wrong.

At the ticket office at King’s Cross, the rude and aggressively unhelpful man behind the counter (who it must be said was the only unhelpful person I encountered that day and, funnily enough, was the only one not wearing a name badge, refused to tell me his name when I asked, and is otherwise unidentifiable and whom, for the sake of narrative clarity, I think I shall refer to as Arbuthnot) stared angrily at me when I asked to collect my replacement tickets. Not being the holder of the credit card on which the tickets were bought I was, according to him, not allowed to collect my tickets.

“I spoke to someone on the phone-” I began.

Arbuthnot cut me off and spoke to me slowly as if I were stupid. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Which is why I’m trying to tell you,” I responded, foolishly thinking that explaining the problem might allow him to help me. He was unimpressed by this manoeuvre.

“If you don’t have the card you can’t get the tickets. You’ll have to go to the ticket office.” He then turned to the person behind me in the queue, ignoring my protestation that this actually was the ticket office.

I had by now missed my train so had more time on my hands. I called the booking line again. Again, a very helpful person told me that they’d faxed my booking confirmation to the ticket office so that I could collect the tickets. (Yes, faxed. I really do mean faxed. Staggering, isn’t it? Evidently as far as First Capital Connect is concerned, I mused, we are still in the early 1990s. If only their attitude towards ticket pricing were as backward-looking as that towards technology.)

If I could get the internal fax number of the machine in the ticket office, I was told on the phone, they’d send the document again, my tickets would be issued, and all would be well. Not trusting the intelligence of Arbuthnot – rightly, as it turned out – to grasp the complexities of this latest plan, I kept the man on the phone on hold as I approached the counter again. If there was no fax to confirm, could I have the fax number so that it could be re-sent? I asked. Alas not. He refused to give out the number because of – wait for it – ‘security issues’.

Now, I understand we live in sensitive times. The spectre of terrorism looms over us all, and ‘security’ is the word of the moment. I know that. Of course I do. We hear of little else from the government and the scare-mongering press nowadays. But the the thing is – and although I’m no expert I think I can be fairly confident about this – it just isn’t possible to fax a bomb to a train station. Documents yes. Bombs no. There is no way on earth that this can be done. What was the man worried about?

If he wouldn’t tell me the number, perhaps Arbuthnot would care to tell his colleague directly over the phone instead? Of course not. It could be anyone on the other end of the line. It could be a terrorist for pity’s sake! He could be being lured in to telling a terrorist a fax number who would then fax him a bomb and blow him up! That would never do, would it? No no no.

Arbuthnot was clearly getting angry with me for asking that he should do something so out of the ordinary as confer with people from the booking line of the very same company for which he worked, and I was getting frustrated with him for being so unhelpful. It was all rather a tiresome impasse.

Then inspiration struck him. In time-old tradition he dealt with this problem by passing the buck. “Go and talk to Gary the station supervisor,” he told me. “He’s on platform nine in an orange jacket.”

I went off to find Gary and started the process again. In a pleasant change, I found Gary to be very helpful, friendly, courteous and polite. He took me in to his office where we both sat by a fax machine as I called the booking line yet again, explained the situation yet again, this time was able to give them the coveted fax number and, some time later, was delighted as the fax finally turned up. I was ushered on to the platform where the next train was about to pull out of the station, an hour after my original, planned one, had departed.

What an absolutely unnecessary waste of everyone’s time it all was.

Interested readers may pick up the story here:

In the spirit of friendly suggestion then, here is something you might want to consider mentioning to those in charge of such things:

Please, please, please establish some form of system of communication between booking line and station. Not by a fax machine in a distant office, but a phone system, or if pushed an online system. This sort of thing must happen quite often and the provisions to deal with it are, frankly, useless. That is all. It seems fairly simple to me, but then what do I know?