Jun 26 2008
Ordering bus tickets on Citylink website is a silly mess.
Citylink are a bunch of useless amateurs that don’t have the guts to admit their uselessness when it’s pointed out to them.
I spent all day yesterday and half of this morning trying to book tickets to get to Glasgow. I was repeatedly told by the online ordering system:
Please Note: There are currently no fares available for your origin and destination. This may be because you have selected an open return. Please go back and plan your journey again using the return option.
Naturally this error message appears whether you choose Single, Return or Open Return. If I was unlucky the search would fail completely because the hamsters were having their postprandial snooze.
I emailed them to let them know their site was crap (well, I was slightly more constructive than that). They replied an hour later telling me to upgrade my Java installation — they even directed me to http://www.java.com. This was all rather suspicious, because not only do I have the latest Java install, but their site doesn’t even use Java. It does use Javascript extensively, but (1) the two languages are completely unrelated and (2) Javascript cannot be updated by going to that website. This may cause some minor confusion for the layman but I would hope the person who emailed me, the System Development Assistant, would know what languages they use when developing their system! I say the site doesn’t use Java, but I mean on my computer. Their website appears to run with Java Servlets but that’s all on their computers. There’s nothing that me fiddling with my settings will do.
Just out of interest I fired up IE6 in Windows and tried again. It worked! Well, maybe there is something wrong with Firefox after all… but no, my usual system was now working fine. What had they changed?
So, do you think they told me to look for the tartan paint while they fixed everything in the background? I’m quite inclined to send them a rude email back asking them not to take the piss.