I’ve just spent an hour and a half booking a stack of train tickets for the next few months. I do this a few times a year and, with practice, I’ve become pretty good at it. I object to subjugating my plans to the vagaries of the ticketing system but it seems obviously true to me that the “it’s possible to travel very cheaply if you’re flexible” isn’t just a rhetorical justification for a crap system. However I can’t help but wonder about the sheer amount of time that’s be wasted on aggregate by people doing this each year.

Not unlike the process of being exploited if you’re unwilling to change energy supplier once a year or more.