LAHORE, Nov 16: An elderly special ticket examiner was suspended from service when he failed to allot a seat in the Rawalpindi-bound rail car to an officer posted at the Railway Headquarters.

The junior commercial officer was carrying a complementary ticket on which the reservation office had marked a certain number of the seat. Neither the officer nor the STE could find the number anywhere in the air-conditioned parlour coach.

The officer, posted at the department which regulates ticket examiners working, felt so offended that he got the STE suspended from service on his return to the headquarters offices at Lahore, charging him with misconduct.

The AC parlour coach in the rail-car has 60 seats in Rows A to P, with row I missing. The last seat is P-4. Ironically, the railway reservation office allots seats in numerical order from Lahore although no such arrangement exists.

This results in passengers’ altercation with the train’s commercial staff for their seats. This anomaly does not exist when seats from Rawalpindi to Lahore are allotted in the right order and no dispute ever takes place on the downward journey.

The officer failed to understand that it was the fault of his department and not the STE who is there only to supervise if passengers are in possession of tickets. If the officer was allotted seat number 12 by the reservation office, it was again his department to verify if this number existed in the AC parlour coach.

The reservation office in Lahore is known for wrongful bookings and at no time its staff feel obliged to satisfy passengers. The staff invariably put wrong seat number, incorrect timings and dates and allot more or less than the number of seats requested by people.

The staff of this office is usually seen engaged in dispute with passengers. It has also happened time and again that the staff does not carefully read chits given to them with full inscription of booking requirements.

The staff is either doing it out of sheer negligence or is not trained enough to handle computerized booking.