I bought a roundtrip ticket from Limoges, France to London -- the trip involves two segments: Limoges/Paris and Paris/London and vice versa on the return trip. I purchased my supposed fully exchangeable ticket on line from SNCF and off I went to London. When my last meeting of the day on Thursday was cancelled I quickly went online to try to change my return ticket from Friday morning to Thursday afternoon. No luck, I couldn't change it online and the website only provided the four digit number you could call if you were in France -- of course I was in London. Not to worry, I found the number for the London office of SNCF and called to ask for the date and time of my journey to be changed, but to no avail....I was told that the "system" couldn't handle a change to an international ticket and I must go to the Eurostar ticket office at the station.

Thursday afternoon I duly arrived at the Eurostar ticket office and my London/Paris portion was changed with little problem. But not the Paris/Limoges portion -- the agent wrote a message on that part of the ticket asking the ticket agent in Paris to change it for me. Upon arrival in Paris, I headed for the ticket office, this time SNCF because the portion to be changed is domestic, but 40 minutes later the ticket agents still hadn't figured out how to change this ticket. Remember I had a physical ticket in my hand! After a lengthy telephone conversation with the Eurostar ticket office on the floor above it was determined that I should go to see them and they would make the change.

Off I went -- by this time, I'm becoming very anxious because the last train would be leaving in less than an hour and I still had to get across Paris to another station. But, on with the story....I reported to the Eurostar ticket agent who met with several colleagues to talk about this problem. But, it was determined that there was nothing they could do since it was part of a ticket not a whole ticket! The computer system just couldn't accommodate changing half a ticket that had an international element to it.

To give Eurostar their due, they issued me with a free ticket from Paris to Limoges, but wished me luck on the train saying that the train manager might not be happy with this situation. To help mitigate any potential problems, the agent wrote a very long explanation on the back of the ticket asking for the train manager's understanding of the situation. The good news is, that the train manager arrived to inspect my ticket and very pleasantly wished me bon voyage, so the outcome was a good one.

So what does this have to do with government systems you might ask? Well, I know that in many countries governments are making significant policy changes particularly those involving pension, benefits, taxes, etc., that involve changes to the processes that deliver these services. I also know that the systems that underpin these services are often purpose-built, extremely complex and very big, not always the best combination when thinking of making changes. I wonder sometimes whether the systems we have in place, instead of contributing to agility and flexibility become major hurdles that are just too big to overcome.