An information system for one’s mobile phone. A lousy
user interface, partly necessitated by the small form factor.
And every second counts, because it is charged by time, not a
per-byte or flat-rate fee.
Therefore, obviously, WAP is only useful for information
I really need, and which I need right now,
and for which I cannot simply go home and use my usual
internet connection. Such as, to pick a topic at random, train times.
So it was I found myself in Lydney
yesterday (Sunday). Lydney might or might not be a lovely
village, but from the train station all you see is a few
house-backs, a bus graveyard, a rusty wrecked car, and two
doorless brick shelters. The paper timetable listed no trains
for over three hours. We wanted confirmation before
wandering off to look for a pub. The Railway Enquiries number
(0845 748 4950) was busy. In desperation I thought
I’d see if WAP could manage the job. My Virgin phone has
two links marked Travel. Both lead to adverts for
special offers and no actual information. In the end, after
twenty minutes of wandering through the menu structure and
gritting my teeth at tiny progress indicators, I found
Google. Google found several train timetables, including one
Dutch one, and (amazingly) a 500 error page or two. One of them
worked. Praise Google!
WAP does have a link to PocketBeer.com, which
located the nearest pub—in another village–but when
I tried to follow a link to a page with the pub’s
address, I got a 500 again. Argh.
It was very cold and windy, and Jeremy and I were still
dressed in the clothes we wore to her sister Ellë’s
wedding, not to mention clutching a bouquet of very exotic
flowers.
In the end it was the much-overlooked press-button information
point that supplied the most authoratative and useful
confirmation of the train times. It also warned us that,
because of severe weather, train times were liable to change.
By happy chance, someone else pressed the button for the other
platform, which alerted us to a train we had overlooked in the
opposite direction, which was much earlier than the one we were
interminably waiting for. It would at least take us to a
station in an actual city, with the prospect of food, hot
drinks, and maybe even a warm room to wait in. So we worked out
an alternative route. Pressing the button again, we discovered
the message had changed—the robot apologised profusely for
cancelling the train we had just decided not to catch. We were
aware of some fallen trees on the way to the station, but this
was this was the first indication of just how badly the train
system was affected.
WAP, despite being accessed via a device that knows my location
to within a hundred metres, is incapable of delivering such
locally specific information. (Even the pub guide requires that
I enter the name of the town using the keypad.)
0845 748 4950 is similarly useless: you can press 1 to
enquire about the weather, but it is organized not
geographically, but according to the companies that run the
services. Useless, in fact.
In the end the journey home, which took 3 hours total on
Saturday, took twelve full hours (Taxi from the hotel at 11:30,
bus from the Oxford train station arriving 23:30). The
Lydney–Goucester leg was the most dramatic, actually
having to stop at an apple orchard because the wreck of one of
the trees had fallen over the line. I have never been so
pleased to see Didcot Parkway train station.
