London's transport network has long been a joke - archaic rolling stock, rotting tracks, timetables that might as well not exist, and all this at a price that makes your wallet weep.
Well, Transport for London has upped the ante now. It appears that on Saturday morning, a fault in the Oyster card system lead to thousands of passengers' top-up swipe cards being wiped. TFL then had to resort to emergency plan A; opening all ticket barriers and allowing free bus travel until the fault was fixed.

So not only is TFL rubbish, it's even losing itself money through IT incompetence. Maybe worth trialing any Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology well before you buy.