Life in the front line as a public sector worker has to be fairly tough. But sometimes you have to wonder if they make it even harder for themselves.

Last night, going to the Barbican to see the theatre group Complicite, my travelcard refused to work at the tube barriers at Paddington.

I went up to the gentleman operating the swing barrier and said: "Excuse me, sir - can I get through with this?", producing the ticket at the same time.
"I'm sorry?" Said the man.
"Can I get through with this?"
"Do you mean, 'It's not working'?"
"Well I don't know, I don't think it is..."
"So 'It's not working'. Not difficult is it?" He said, voice laden with sarcasm, opening the barrier for me. "Hey!" I said, wanting to go back and have my say on this.

"No, it's easy, you just say it's not working," he said, dismissing me.

Well he can dismiss me all he likes but, like every member of the blogosphere, I can damn well vent my self-righteous anger to all twelve people who will accidentally visit my weblog while trying to find something else.

I mean, how in God's name is his version more polite than mine? My version had a polite introduction, followed by a polite question and the production of my (valid) ticket. His version required me to grunt, "It's not working," in his general direction.

I get the feeling that if I'd gone up and said, "Excuse me, sir, but my ticket's not working," he'd have said: "What you mean is, 'Can I get through with this?'"

Anyway, short of writing what passes for a three hundred word electronic sigh, there's very little I can do. The performance, on the other hand, was magical.

Complicite had devised a show all about an Indian mathematician who travels to Cambridge University in the 1930s. It's admittedly an unlikely scenario for a two-hour stage drama, played out on a set comprising a whiteboard, a projector and the occasional video sequence of a train or an Indian city, but it worked brilliantly.

The acting was first class, the set ingenious, and the environment ideal. The only mild complaint I'd have is an echo of the thoughts expressed, loudly, by one of the sixth form girls who'd crowded the row to my right. When the show finished she bellowed: "So are we supposed to understand what the hell that was all about?"

For all the fantastic scenes, clever acting and spontaenous eruptions of dance, music, verve and intrigue, it was bloody hard to make sense of what was going on. The Indian mathematician made irregular appearances but was outdone by what were apparently a modern-day couple, a hedge fund operator and a lecturer.

By the end the lecturer had died of a brain haemorrhage on a train (I'm not spoiling the ending, this will be the least of your worries by the end of the show if you go to see it), the man has taken her maths books to India to throw them in a river, and back in the 1930s the Indian mathematician has also bought the proverbial farm.

But no one seemed to be entirely sure what all this was telling us. Nominally the whole show was about string theory, infinity, sequences of numbers and all kinds of other equations. However at no stage was anything profound ever revealed, mathematical or otherwise. I came away feeling like I must have missed the point on at least one level if not more.

Despite that I really enjoyed myself. It sounds silly to say but even though I don't have a clue what I am supposed to have taken from that performance, I'd go again. In fact I might have to go again about nine times to fully appreciate what I'm watching. Maybe that's a good thing.