I slept in by 10 minutes this morning. Any more and I would have missd the train for the trip to the research brainstorming session. Fortunately I'd purchased my ticket in advance last night. Just as well really as the ticket office at the station has just been computerised B-}

The old(-technology) ticket printing machine has now been replaced by a spanking new PC with a card reader attached to the keyboard in a very Heath-Robinson arrangement. Alas, the new system has slowed down the sale of tickets considerably. Part of the problem will be unfamiliarity with the new way of doing things and that aspect should speed up in due course as the clerks get more proficient. However, whilst I was buying my ticket last night I commented that the new system seemed to be slower than the old way of doing things. "It's a pile of junk" paraphrases the reply I received ;-) Why, I asked, did the computer not have a 'common short-cuts' capability to allow the details of the most common ticket sales to be set up so that these could be issued quickly. "Oh! You can create short-cuts but it still takes six separate keystrokes/screens to bring each up" was the reply. This is slower than the old, manual, way of doing things. Doh! Whoever designed that "pile of junk" should have done some form of user-evaluation. In the meantime, customers have to wait longer for their tickets causing frustration and annoyance which gets taken out on the hapless clerk. No wonder many people have a jaundiced attitude towards computerisation. Needless to say I'll be buying my ticket for tomorrow when I get off the train on my way home tonight! Which reminds me of the joke about the Microsoft and Apple employees travelling by train together to a conference. You've probably heard it...