Reply to post: Also sometime in the 1990s .....

Also sometime in the 1990s .....

Back in the 1990s, a certain bus company in a large city ran a "lucky ticket number" promotion. If your ticket had the right serial number, it could be exchanged at any Travelcard agent (and there was one such in almost every one of those little parades of shops, all the way around the ring road) for a £10 cash prize.

This was during a time when I happened to have the wherewithal to print reasonably convincing (well, they convinced the drivers, and the inspectors .....) fake bus tickets; and with the help of my then-flatmate, a crazy plan was formulated.

This involved printing a large supply of tickets with recent dates and the winning serial number, and a couple of Daysavers with that day's date; then one of us catching the 11C and riding clockwise around the A4040, the other catching the 11A and going anticlockwise, getting off at every Travelcard agent along the way and exchanging one of our forged tickets for a real tenner, and ultimately meeting up at a rendezvous point 180 degrees away from the starting point to decide whether we should try the same stunt again, or just head for home, perhaps in time to see our exploits on Central News. We reckoned that this would be enough time to grab a fair number of tenners, but not quite enough time for them to twig that something was amiss.

Every time we discussed it, though, we found a new and terrible way for it to go wrong. If I didn't scare him off with my objections, he scared me off with his. And eventually the promotion came to an end, before we could summon up the courage to go through with our plan.