Meet the Ticket Machine

Transport connections in south London are tenuous. Asking for help at the local station is a mistake you only make the once. The man behind the counter has banged his head and woken up in what appears to him to be an alternate reality. His London has a jumbled geography. Brixton abuts Hendon, Paddington slides up next to Croydon. The Queen lives in a council block in Sutton. He’s surprised and fearful to hear your questions and realise that what he believed was the correct geography of our great metropolis has been rendered a fiction. Plus, he will have noticed that you have two eyes and be speaking the language of devils. It’s a dark, fearful universe he’s woken up in. You can’t expect much help there.

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Transport for London is aware of this. They provide machines to subtract the dreadful consequences of interaction with the man behind the counter. ‘Fast Ticket’ it says on them. They are not. The screens are thump sensitive and they cogitate like a proto-Babbage engine filled with jam. Two other things to note: firstly, they switch off if a train is approaching the station; secondly, TfL staff have put considerable effort into locating the ticket machine so the sun reflects off the screen, ensuring all ticket selections you make are effectively random. This is why there are people in Croydon. All bemused pressers of the wrong button.

If you are fortunate enough to have awoken the machine and be able to see the screen without the sun’s reflection scouring off your retina, you are in luck. Further squinting and poking will uncover tickets to your intended destination. About fifty different tickets to the same place, all apparently near identical other than price. Off-peak, Really Off-Peak, Standard, that bit between 11-12 on Wednesday when the train is full of bathshy alcoholics, via London, not via London (but I want to go to London!). The pricing isn’t random, though you may reasonably assume that at certain times of the day train travel is restricted to Russian oligarchs. Of course that’s the time you want to travel and you are not a Russian oligarch. You’re probably not even Russian. You are out of pocket.

You can try clicking the ‘info’ button next to each ticket to try and make an informed selection. Upon thumping this option, the machine will – for once promptly – declaim all knowledge of that ticket and direct you to The Man Behind the Counter. You glance over there. He’s probably still trying to figure out why Ealing is now in east London and what happened to everyone’s faces. Oh god, the EYES! You have to go back and ask him, painful though it will be for the both of you. Faced by this again (the EYES!) he’ll scuttle into the back office and you’ll see him wedging himself into the space behind a filing cabinet. You’re left there standing, the unwitting head of a growing conga of anxious passengers. Eventually, you realise he’s not coming back. Ever. This reality has overwhelmed him. Eyes clamped shut, in the tight dusty space behind the cabinet, he can pretend that none of this ever happened. You still, however, need to purchase a ticket. You can’t go back to the machine. It will know. But you can feel the anger growing behind you, like heat on the back of your neck. It grows and grows until it burns like a poorly cooled nuclear reactor. You don’t want to look back. Trains are pulling in and out of the station. The trains the people lined up behind you wanted. But the conga line must be down the High Street, surely. It feels like you have stood there for years watching what appears to be a sobbing metal filing cabinet. You take a quick glance over your shoulder to find yourself locking eyes with a man whose genetic heritage involved close proximity to that poorly maintained nuclear reactor. By the time you have wrenched your eyes free to face forward, the blind is being yanked down. CLOSED, it says, with grim finality. You are left to try an explain to the man behind you who’s just missed the kick-off at Millwall why he should you put you down the right way up.

So, back to the machine, and the imponderable ticket selection. Close your eyes, reach out, and guess. No one on the network is going to know better than your wandering fingertip. It’s all a game of bluff. The ticket gates work on the same logic. You’ve seen Star Wars, you know that the Imperial Storm Troopers are all clones. You also know they had a little guy in R2D2. Ticket barriers: they have small, spitting Bob Crow homunculi secreted inside, cloned from a glass he left in the TfL HQ during pre-strike negotiations some years back. They’ll let you through or stop you. Really, it’s a fifty thing. Don’t think that whether they open or close has any relationship to the ticket you feed it. It’s dark in there and Bob can’t read. There’s only really one approach to the ticket gate, and that’s the Full Charge of the Light Brigade (if you can find a horse, all the better).

There are only three outcomes.

There are three possible outcomes of an encounter with a ticket barrier. First, a glorious success, the gates swing open. You have been judged and found to be on the VIP list. St Bob of the Barrier has granted you access to the chosen land beyond. Second, the barrier remains closed and immoveable. You crumple, as do the six people behind, as you concertina into the same small area of space. You’re now close enough to your fellow commuters that if a survey was taken there and then, you’d have to classify them as sex partners. Third, you get halfway through, the joy bubbling up inside, as the gate then suddenly chomps shut like the jaws of a hungry crocodile. You have just sacrificed your leg for the man with the expired travelcard in front. No worries though, the gates are staffed by an helpful TfL operative. After the statutory period of abuse, he’ll make you buy a replacement ticket so expensive that you’ll hear your bank manager scream, and he’s in Liverpool. This will involve standing in line to be publicly humiliated, like you’ve been scripted into an Alabaman chain gang, and you’re just waiting for the uniform to be delivered. Any attempt to protest the unreasonableness of this will result in a call being issued to the station announcer to request the presence of the British Transport Police, though fortunately all station announcements are made in slurred Klingon so they’ll be none the wiser). Whilst waiting for the paperwork to be completed (the same amount of time that it took humanity to discover language and invent writing), you can busy yourself by counting the hundred and six ticketless teenagers shimmying through the gates opposite under the watchful eye of the helpful TfL operative.

This presumes that you want a popular destination. Less popular destinations involve a game of Fast Ticket Whack-A-Keyboard. Generally, you’ll be presented with an alphabetical keyboard, thus having to unlearn an entire lifetime of typing. This involves standing bereft in front of the keyboard as though you’ve just staggered out of the woods after being brought up by a family of wolves. The machine will make unhelpful guesses based on characters you never intended to select. Christopher Columbus made the same mistake, letting the machine decide. You may be less lucky then him and find yourself marooned in Thamesmead at 2am without the benefits of massive and superior firepower.

Those savvy sailors of the Capital’s transportation canals will have a suitable nautical Oyster Card. Simply tap it on the gate and St Bob of the Barrier will grant you one of the three outcomes described above. You’ll be billed an entirely random fee for your trouble. You can question this fee, but be warned, the people than man the telephones are professionals. Tangle with them at your peril. Those of you with siblings will remember the fruitless game of repetition. They ask a question, you repeat it. These people have elevated this childish pastime into a weapon of war. They will repeat and repeat and repeat until your soul flees your body and you slam down the phone. These people have driven their own families into madness and suicide just rehearsing for calls like yours.

And finally. The cryptic geography. It’s worse than the man behind the ticket counter feared when he woke up here. The ticket machine may have suggested you could save money by taking a topologically unfeasible not-via-London option on a variety of destinations. This often entails a willingness to run several hundred metres and climb several dozen platforms steps. There’s little in life so filled with delight as a gentle jog down a closed-up and graffitied High Street as you follow your suggested change between Nowhere West and East Nowhere. The theme from Chariots of Fire plays through the your head while track-suited locals offer to help you keep the pace. In the more helpful suburbs they will offer to carry your valuables so you can sprint unencumbered to your inevitably cancelled connection.