Great Western Coffee Shop

I'm trying to book the cheapest return from Tiverton - Bristol - Tiverton for tomorrow. I had £6.60 up, £4.40 back, using my railcard, but I could not pay. Eight minutes of music on hold followed, after which I was told there was a problem with the website, and that skilled technicians were hard at work as we speak.

I tried several times over the next couple of hours without success. Then, my basket showed up empty. I tried again - I could still get the £6.60 up, but the cheapest down fare is now £8.40. And I still couldn't buy them!

I tried using Cross Country and Trans Pennine sites - neither seemed to be working. There must be industry-wide gremlins at work.

More websites than usual needing repairs?

Too right: from the real time station departures (TIGER):

That was pretty much the long and short of it. I resolved the issue when I realised that Cross Country had a different problem, and booked a ticket on a different train. No more problems with electronic machinery for me! Except...

I arrived at Tiverton Parkway in good time - fortunately. The one ticket machine would not accept card payments. From the message on the screen, I guessed that it was not able to communicate with the bank. So I used the telephone payment system. On the train, I realised that although my payment had been accepted, I had not been asked for the car registration number. A play with Apcoa's customer service line got me no further than I expected - press one for this, two for that a few times, then "Please waitfor the next operator" and finally "Sorry, the mail box is full. Goodbye".

My luck seemed to improve with an email, quickly answered, which looks to have identified my payment. Here's hoping.

As my cousin, who works on ITSO cards, says never trust electronics.  They say AI will put everyone out of work however it seems to me everyone will be employed sorting out GIGO.

True. I seem to spend more time maintaining PC, laptop, tablet and "smart" phone than I do using them.