More Oyster woe

It seems that the London Travel Watch people did get some action out of TfL as I have at last heard back from the Oyster people about the overcharging and abusive staff we experienced at Bank tube station on 16th March this year.

So it has taken theTfL/Oyster people over 6 weeks to get back to me.

This week I am in Toronto attending the Smalltalk Solutions conference. I got the email message from TfL on Sunday (29th Apr) asking me confirm my identity with several pieces of information I didn't have with me in Toronto. I decided to reply to them when I got back to London on Friday (4th May).

Imagine my surprise when, after only a couple of days I got another email message from TfL telling me that they now considered the matter closed because I had not got back to them fast enough! They gave me 3 days from the instant they *sent* the first email message to me. Stunning.

I took time out from the conference to write a reply to them explaining that I was away and that I would send them the details as soon as I could upon my return. I got an automated response from them saying that they would consider my response to them within 7 days.

So, I had to wait for over 6 weeks for TfL to get in touch and I had to get help from London Travel Watch to make even that happen. Then TfL close off the issue after only three days from when they finally sent a response to me (which gave me one working day to respond in the end) and then they give themselves a relaxed 7 days to even look at my response to them asking them to not close the issue.

This smells like someone massaging the stats to make themselves look good: Oh, yes, we managed to close nnn issues this week and none of them were open for more than 2 working days!

The fact that none of the actual problems have been dealt with would be quietly forgotten, of course.