Lightspeed, that’s supposed to be quick you know.

 

My travel card is due for renewal soon, I visited the website of the company that supplies my card with the intention of buying a new card. Simple enough, select the type of card I need, select the cards expiry date, confirm my address so that card gets sent to me, so far so good. The next step is where it gets complicated, I had to select the type of card I was paying with, not difficult, if I got confused it’s conveniently written on the front of the card, payment card type selected now to enter card details, four very simple steps. Enter the long number on the front of the card, done! enter the three digit security code, yup! expiry date, check. enter card holders name, well duh! click on make payment, get taken to a second page asking for my user name and password, don’t have one click exit. get returned to the purchase page which now states that the payment wasn’t authorised so you can’t have a new travel card, would you like to try again? you bet I would! Repeat the process of entering card details, go to worldpay security site which is, again, asking for user name and password, tell it politely that I don’t have one, Stagecoach says you can’t have a ticket! Try again? oh ok then. By this time, to quote a mate, “My piss is starting to boil” get to the worldpay bit, this time I thought I’d enter what I normally used as a username and password. This time I get a new message; YOU HAVE ENTERED THE INCORRECT INFORMATION TOO MANY TIMES, YOUR CARD HAS BEEN BLOCKED! What? at this point I now have steam that has a subtle hint of yellow coming from my ears. so I decide to phone worldpay, apparently part of RBS and end up speaking to a colonial. Again, WHAT? Royal bank of Scotland, why am I speaking to a yank? As expected a man in Somewhere, North America wasn’t very helpful, so I thought I’d give it another go. same screen, card blocked call this number, called number to be put through to my bank who are closed. So I thought I’d log on to my account and transfer some cash from there to another account, only to be told, in very posh terms, it’d actually be quicker to put the money in the other bank in person. To me that seems ridiculous, my bank know that the funds are there, computers communicate at the speed of light. I can send music to my family in the states and the will have it within seconds, so what makes money so different? I’m sure that there’s very complicated reasons why the transfer of cash can’t be instantaneous, and I suspect it has something to do with the banks making money from it. so I now have two options, Phone my main bank and, after being on hold for three quarters of an hour ask some indolent numpty in Northshire to unblock my card so that I can make a payment to Stagecoach, this will of course result in me having to go through the worldpay security again, which means that I won’t be able to make the payment because I’m not registered with worldpay. Or go to the bank tomorrow and put cash in. Whilst  the whole thing seems a bit of a petty moan and I already know what I’m going to do, it shouldn’t be that complicated.

On the brighter side, I’m off to Dover on Sunday to explore the Napoleonic defences with some top mates, I’ll write more about that after the event. It should be a good day.