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We just want to go to Washington. Andy stopped by Penn Station yesterday to buy tickets, and discovered that Amtrak is now requiring each ticket to have the passenger's name. The machines will only sell you tickets with your own name, and there was a long line to buy a ticket from a human being, so he came home.
Today, he went and stood in line and talked to a ticket agent, as requested yesterday. Lo and behold, it now appears that even the ticket agent can't sell him a ticket with someone else's name. We'll need to either go down there together, or call for reservations separately and hope that one of us doesn't get the last seat on the desired train. The whole point of this exercise is to ensure that we'll both have seats on the same train; refusal to sell anyone more than one ticket seems counterproductive.
Granted, they're swimming in customers right now, but three and six and twelve months from now, Amtrak is going to need goodwill again. They're not getting it this way. The policy is bad enough. The real stupidity, the real annoyance, is that nobody at Amtrak seems sure of what the policy is, so the station was full of people who had been told they could buy tickets for spouses or co-workers if they did it in person, people who waited in long lines and then were turned away, because someone changed their mind in the last 12 hours, and couldn't be bothered to post signs explaining the policy of the hour.
That I'm going to have to show ID to board the train seems trivial in comparison, though I can't imagine what anyone thinks it will accomplish. If this is an anti-terrorist move, someone should remind them that every one of the hijackers on Sept. 11th had good enough ID to board a commercial flight.
Today, he went and stood in line and talked to a ticket agent, as requested yesterday. Lo and behold, it now appears that even the ticket agent can't sell him a ticket with someone else's name. We'll need to either go down there together, or call for reservations separately and hope that one of us doesn't get the last seat on the desired train. The whole point of this exercise is to ensure that we'll both have seats on the same train; refusal to sell anyone more than one ticket seems counterproductive.
Granted, they're swimming in customers right now, but three and six and twelve months from now, Amtrak is going to need goodwill again. They're not getting it this way. The policy is bad enough. The real stupidity, the real annoyance, is that nobody at Amtrak seems sure of what the policy is, so the station was full of people who had been told they could buy tickets for spouses or co-workers if they did it in person, people who waited in long lines and then were turned away, because someone changed their mind in the last 12 hours, and couldn't be bothered to post signs explaining the policy of the hour.
That I'm going to have to show ID to board the train seems trivial in comparison, though I can't imagine what anyone thinks it will accomplish. If this is an anti-terrorist move, someone should remind them that every one of the hijackers on Sept. 11th had good enough ID to board a commercial flight.