I've had a noncommittal reply from LM asking for my tickets in order that they can investigate the matter and send me any appropriate refunds.
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Unfortunately, my email complaint from last week hasn't helped matters and I was again refused sale of this ticket today at NMP. Even though I provided a printout from the Manual, the clerk read it and said "no, we still can't sell it" and pointed to the fact that all the examples were selling tickets from boundary zones and the paragraph saying "if there is no fare to boundary zone X in your TIS sell to the first named station in the zone, or London Terminals if cheaper". No amount of reasoning would change her mind. I bought a single to WFJ.
I asked to speak to a manager, who accompanied me up to the train as it was about to leave. The gist of his reason for not selling the ticket was "well, it's quite ambiguous, but if we sold you this ticket it would be valid for you to travel to any boundary of zone 3, all around London if you wanted to, and it's not expensive enough for you to do that". I'd have loved to stay and take the argument to pieces, but I wasn't missing the train over it.
The guard, an American chap, was happy to O/D excess the ticket to WFJ and let me off 10p that I was short in coins so he/I didn't have to break a note.
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I've figured out a cheaper way to do my journey seeing as I'm going up and down to [stn]NMP[/stn] a dozen times over the next month or so; an off-peak return (SVR) from NMP to [stn]EUS[/stn] has no morning restrictions. So I'll pitch up at NMP some day, find the offending clerk, and request several SVRs for upcoming dates with reservations on some Virgin trains between [stn]MKC[/stn] and EUS