easyjet still unable to sell tickets with web site (but INN ticket desk win)

After previously failing to contact Barclays about a housy (CHAPS) payment [0], I realised the too-high-or-too-low-ness was not the only generic thing about the error message.  The contact number was also generic.  Using a so-called "premier" phone number got thru in reasonable time and out of hours, and resulted in confirmation that I must visit a UK branch to make a CHAPS payment.  For reference, the limits are 50k fiatz(2022) for online banking, and 15k fiatz(2022) for telephone banking.

[0] <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2022/08/barclays-uncontactable.html>

Not being in the UK at the time, this then required flying.  I contacted the private flight broker I'd used for INN, but they said they had nothing.  

Easyjet has a service out of tiny Innsbruck several days a week.  Of course, Easyjet have failed to sell me a ticket every time I've tried to buy one recently [1] [2] [3], but maybe I could create a new account (again) or something.  This time, it failed sooner.  I went to their front page, completed a form, clicked on the submission button, which was labelled something like "GET CHEAP TICKETS", and nothing happened.  That was it.  The web, the primary way of wibbling on the internet, is designed so that web site makers can, and do, replace the concept of "button" with non-working pretend buttons.  People like Tim Berners Lee and Roy Fielding can tell you why this is good; meanwhile, the thing they "invented" does not work.  We would have been better off with the next French empire and Minitel; maybe then buttons would immutably be buttons, being buttons at some layer where the developer of a particular mail-order service could not stop it being a button.

[1] <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/easyjet-fails.html> 

[2] <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/12/easyjet-more-fails.html>

[3] Austrian Airlines (and easyjet, BA, Lufthansa) unable to sell tickets <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2022/07/austrian-airlines-unable-to-sell-tickets.html>

So I cycled to Innsbruck airport on a Sunday, on the offchance Easyjet's ticket desk was open on a Sunday, in Catholic Tirol.  It was!

The purchase took around 25 minutes, during which I was not allowed to go and get a coffee.  Whatever was happening during this time, it did not include entering my passenger information, as I discovered later when I checked in online.  But I did not have to do battle with shonky IT systems.  I just stood there, and someone else got to fight with the IT.  The procedure seemed fairly involved, and it was necessary for them to consult several thick ringbinders of printed instructions at critical points along the way.  They said they had not done it for a while.  But they got there, and I got a ticket.  They even accepted cash payment.  The person whose job it was didn't seem to realise how brilliant the service was.  They told me it was more expensive this way, and it would be cheaper for me to book it on the web myself.  I said the tiny booking fee did not really count as more expensive, and that their web site did not work for me.  They took issue with this, and, in a browser, went to easyjet.com.  It works, they said.  I said no, the front page loads, it just doesn't work when I try to actually do something.  This is the level we are dealing with.  But the agent should not do themselves down.  I finally have a ticket for an airline that flies from my local airport, having tried and failed however-many times in the last year.

During their endeavor, I learned a new word, "sizer", which is the cage you can use to check the size of your cabin bag or briefcase.  It might be a Germanism; anyway it's a good word.

Their system did not allow printing of tickets, so the agent took a screenshot of their terminal, and printed that.  Check out how they use the booking reference as the command prompt.  The flight number, departure and arrival times, airport and terminal, are all in there too.