Oyster cards. As if life wasn’t complicated enough.

Oyster cards. Why? Remember when you would hand over your money to a Person at the underground station? They would give you a ticket and some change. Simple. Now you have to force-feed a machine with your last precious banknote and perform a series of mad swiping movements to be allowed through the barrier at all. Youngsters seem to understand the system, but what about the rest of us? What ever happened to the Person, anyway? And who do you ask when your banknote gets chewed up and it all goes horribly wrong? The youngster, presumably, only he's already spent five minutes explaining to an old lady how to buy a day return and there’s only so many trains he’s prepared to miss before his patience runs out. That’s supposing you can actually get an Oyster card at all, that is. Adult ones are fairly simple, but it’s a nightmare trying to get one for your kids. You need the right form (there’s two categories of youngster, apparently) and don’t even think of asking for a form at the station. That would be too easy. You can’t download it, either. No, you need to go to the Post Office, fill it in, add a photo, add signatures of the child, yourself and maybe even a teacher, add some dosh and then return it to the Post Office, then wait for the Oyster Card to arrive in the post. It arrives with some patronising drivel about how they will take your Oyster Card away if you misbehave on the train (over my dead body). Your youngster then takes it to the underground, promptly loses it, and the whole process begins again. Life is complicated enough without Oyster Cards. Or multi-choice telephone answering services. Or Indian call centres. Let’s face it, I don’t even understand my TV anymore.