One would have thought that getting a bunch of passport photos done in London would be no great hassle—but you’d be wrong. For a while I’ve needed to get some taken for the Tory conference accreditation form so on Thursday I popped into Hampstead Post Office to use the photo machine there. It was out of order. I went back this morning thinking that it would have been fixed in the meantime. How foolish I was.
This lunchtime I went to Victoria to use the machines there. I went into one and started plopping in the four pounds that I had to pay to get four photos. But when I got to three pounds eighty it told me the service was temporarily unavailable. To be fair, it did inform me of a number I could ring to get a refund if I called with the booth number but, seeing as I was pressed for time, I decided to just write the money off and dashed over to the machine on the other side. Here, I managed to get three pounds in but it wouldn’t accept my last pound coin. I sprinted round the station trying to swap the faulty coin but lots of places couldn’t open their tills without me purchasing something. Seeing as I was down to my last quid, I couldn’t do that. Eventually, a kind lady at the florist swapped it for me. But even this replacement coin didn’t work. By the time I had swapped this one, the first three pounds I had entered had disappeared off into the machine.
Eventually, after I had gone off taken out some money and purchased something to get change, I managed to get four pounds in and my photos done. But the total cost of four photos ended up being £10.80.
Maybe, I am just turning into a whineger but it does seem that these little tasks are getting ever-more stress inducing. And don’t get me started on HSBC—my ‘local bank’—which want me to send them copies of my bank statement despite the fact that they are my bank and it is them who send me the statements in the first place.
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