China Railway Ministry Site Accused of Cheating on Ticket Sales
If you’re riding a Chinese sleeper train, you should know that not all bunks are created equal. The top bunk? That’s for chumps. It’s difficult to get to, gets super hot at night, and there’s not enough headspace for you to sit up. The middle bunk (in hard sleeper cars only) is better, but requires an even more awkward climb. The bottom bunk is where it’s at; at ground level it is super convenient to get to, and it’s often a gathering place for travelers during the day so anyone sitting there is sure to meet some new friends.
中国の寝台列車に乗車中であれば、全ての寝台が平等に作られたわけではないということを既に知っているだろう。最上段の寝台?それらは間抜けな人々のためにあるものだ。最上段の寝台には大変のぼりづらく、夜間は非常に暑くなり、そして充分な頭部スペースなどありはしない。(ハード・スリーパー車にのみ設けられている)中段の寝台は少しばかりましではあるが、さらに不自然な上り方を要する。下段の寝台は、床レベルに設けられており、横になりやすく、日中はしばしば旅行者達が集う場となるため、下段の寝台に腰かけている人は確実に新しい友人を増やすことができるだろう。
So you can imagine the frustration a Chinese train traveler experienced recently when he tried to buy a ticket for the bottom bunk over thirty times on 12306, the Railway Ministry’s ticket sales site, but kept getting top-bunk tickets instead. What’s more, he was buying soft sleeper tickets, which only have top or bottom bunks. The chances of being randomly assigned a top bunk ticket thirty times in a row? 0.000000093 percent.
It’s not possible that the bottom bunk tickets were sold out because the web ticket sales open two days before tickets are sold in person. In person, ticket buyers can usually request a specific bunk, but the web and phone sales systems are supposed to assign bunks randomly.
Webサイトが開くのが窓口で購入するより2日前なので、最下段の寝台の切符が売り切れているなんてあり得ない。窓口では、通常、特定の寝台を指定して切符を購入することができるのだが、Webや電話では販売システムがランダムに寝台を割り当てているに違いない。
Needless to say, our traveler suspected that his results weren’t random, and that the bottom bunk seats had been held in reserve or something. He wrote an open letter, which was then posted to anti-fraud muckraker Fang Zhouzi’s weibo account.
But customer service representatives at 12306 have responded, saying that the service is entirely random and that it is not secretly reserving bottom bunk tickets for someone else. Given how unlikely — statistically speaking, virtually impossible — it is that a traveler could be randomly assigned to a top-bunk ticket thirty times in a row, it’s a bit hard to believe everything is working as intended. But there may not be foul play involved; 12306 has a history of being incredibly buggy, so that might well be what’s happening here.
0.000000093だ、ではなく、0.000000093%だ、でした。%をつけ忘れていました。訂正します。
了解しました。ありがとうございます。