The National Rail website just tried to charge me £150 to visit a friend for the weekend, a near bankruptcy-inducing figure for a PC Pro staff writer. One short phone call to a helpful operator later, and a few small compromises with regard to my plans, and I only had to pay £27.

Sure, computers are great at automating simple tasks, but they can’t understand that I don’t mind coming back through a different station than I leave from if it’s cheaper, or that I can sneak my bike onto the carriage rather than making a reservation for it, just as long as I’m polite to the conductor.

If the website could listen to my whingeing and had these options then something could perhaps be done, but it needs to be as simple as possible for the vast majority of users who aren’t as troublesome as me, so it doesn’t.

Until computers can handle that sort of reasoning with ease I will always prefer to call an operator than use a website for booking my tickets. Unfortunately, though, it’s far cheaper to run a website than an office full of helpful customer service assistants willing to listen to me barter and convince my way to a £123 saving, so this will get harder and harder from now on.

On the other hand, if you book in advance, the site is a pleasure to use and the tickets are very reasonable, but this is a rare occurrence for me; a computer may have perfect memory and scheduling, but I don’t.

Thanks to i am jae for the image