Gruts lurker Stense thought it was pretty funny I'd resorted to reading washing-up bowls. Today, I found myself reading a railway ticket. This ticket, in fact:
Notice anything odd? Look again. Look at that date: 08-JNR-08.
SINCE WHEN EXACTLY was January abbreviated to JNR? JNR doesn't stand for January. If anything, it stands for Junior. Abbreviating January to JNR (first, third and sixth letters) makes as much sense as abbreviating October to OTE. In other words, it makes no bloody sense whatsoever.
I'll tell you who's behind this. The French. I'll bet there's some sort of silly euro-month standard so that travellers on Eurostar don't get confused, and the French totally insisted on JNR for January (Janvier)—in the same way as they insisted on having that silly e at the end of Concorde. They tend to do an awful lot of that sort of thing, the French.
We Brits are a tolerant bunch, Pierre, but you can push us only so far!
I also read train tickets, and don't like the way they sneak the M into the price, when they don't need to. There is no M in a price. Drop it.
Unless you really paid £2.10 million pounds for a hop from Birkenhead to Bromborough. Which is a bit much.
No, it didn't cost 2.10 million quid to travel from Birkenhead to Bromborough. It was a return ticket, so the Birkenhead to Bromborough leg only cost 1.05 million quid.
The painful thing about that is that down here £2.10M is exactly the cost of a one-way trip from Egham to Staines. In case you don't know, that journey is about three times the length of the train, no more -- Egham is practically part of Staines. And yet up there in wonderland you get a full-blown return ticket for the price.
Pah!
Beholder gets strange "?"s too - in his case instead of "£", which are pound signs if they don't show propperly.
I use a variety of machines, but the one from the last post was the work Win 2003 server running Citrix thin client, so that may not help a lot. This is a straight Win XP Service Pack 2 desktop.
Well I gave it my best shot, with an HTML entity (ampersand-pound-semicolon), but that was thwarted by the software running Gruts. But then I reasoned that " I might also reformat comments to improved presentation" meant what it said. That is, I assumed Mr Carter was a man of his word.
Apologies, of course, if I was mistaken.
And another thing; I bet when it says ROUTE: ANY PERMITTED, it doesn't mean that. Try showing your ticket to the man in the paneled corridor on the Orient Express whilst explaining that you have chosen the scenic route to get to Bromborough. I think it is highly likely that he will not honour the claim so casually made by the ticket-vendor.
I couldn't reformat the text as promised because my online text-editing software was temporarily unavailable. I'll go and fix it right now. (Handy hint: To enter a pound sign, click the Omega icon above the text-entry box, then click the pound sign!)
(I think I've fixed the spurious characters problem, by the way: missing open double-quotes when I declared the character set. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but it seems to have done the trick.)
Route "any permitted" is just a total cop-out. They give the impression you can use eny route, but then if they fancy it, they just say that your route is not a "permitted" one. Try asking for a list of permitted routed, and I bet they can't provide one.
PS £$%^&*() - Just testing!
(Hey! You didn't make a fuss about correcting the childish and deliberate use of 60-pixel width formatting in my earlier post that was only in there to antagonise you. Coping with Gruts readers is like having to deal with naughty children, isn't it? Anyway, I have learned my lesson and won't put any attention-seeking formatting effects in the comments again).
Pah! It previewed the around "attention-seeking" fine and then stripped them on the submit. Pah again!
There is clearly a subtle plan in action here from Mr Carter, under the guise of an "improved" comment system - in the previous system e-mail, and even name were optional. Now they're required, and the "Note" has changed from:
to
What then, you ask yourself, is reformatting "to improved presentation", and what happens if a comment is only irrelevant and needlessly offensive but not "so forth"? We should be told.
Beholder: "You didn't make a fuss about correcting the childish and deliberate use of 60-pixel width formatting in my earlier post that was only in there to antagonise you."
Oh, it was deliberate was it? I thought it was just some weird bug and was going to wait to see if it happened again.
Beholder: "Pah! It previewed the blink tags around "attention-seeking" fine and then stripped them on the submit. Pah again!"
Oh, that's annoying. The whole point of a preview button is to let you see what it's going to look like - hence the name. I'll put that one on my 'to fix' list.
Hi
I found the acronym JNR curious and asked South West Trains Customer Services.
Below is the helpful explanation I received, I hope this may answer your original question:-
Happy ticket reading:)
15 August 2012
The industry standard date abbreviations are as follows:
January JNR
July JLY
February FBY
August AUG
March MCH
September SEP
April APR
October OCT
May MAY
November NOV
June JUN
December DMR
This is an industry standard adopted throughout the Mainland GB
Rail Network, over 25 years ago, to reduce the possibility of
fraudulent alteration of handwritten tickets (eg JAN would be
easier to alter to JUN than JNR would be). Additionally
handwritten tickets may be harder to read as they are being
written by a guard on a moving train. These abbreviations make it
easier to identify the months on badly written tickets, with less
chance of confusion.
This industry standard for handwritten tickets was then carried
through on to automated ticket issuing systems.
Thanks.
So, there is some method in the madness. Still pretty bonkers, though, if you ask me.