Computers and the internet have revolutionised our world.

But, as I discovered last Sunday, it’s no good having super clever IT if you forget the non-IT basics.

My companion and I had intended to spend the afternoon in York city centre with the Bolshoi Ballet via a live relay from Moscow.

As you may remember, it snowed on Sunday, so we were looking forward to getting onto the bus and out of the bitter wind.

The bus stop was one of those equipped with a live arrival board, with direct links to trackers in buses so it can say exactly how long it would be before each service would arrive.

The first bus was listed only by its timetabled time, 1.05pm. The second bus had its tracker working and was listed as arriving in 28 minutes.

Since 1.05pm was seven minutes away, we decided to wait rather than go back home and take the car. 1.05pm came and went, 1.10pm, 1.15pm. No bus.

Hoping against hope that it would turn up we stayed where we were instead of heading for the car.

The only sign of time passing was the 1.05pm arrival time vanishing from the board at 1.05.30pm, the snow increasing, the wind getting colder and stronger, and the time for the second bus decreasing minute by minute until it arrived, half an hour after we started waiting.

By then we were frozen, fed up and part of a lengthy queue.

Then the snow scuppered the super clever live satellite link to the Bolshoi Theatre.

But what a contrast between the way City Screen dealt with the non-existent ballet and the way First Bus dealt with its non-existent 1.05pm bus.

City Screen told its customers as they reached the auditorium the satellite link was down, someone was working on it and declined to mark tickets.

A couple of minutes after the start time, the management activated their disaster plan.

They announced that the showing was cancelled, that they were arranging for a recording of the production to be available at a date to be arranged, that they would announce the new date when they knew it, and full refunds were available.

A huge queue of disappointed, but not angry, customers immediately formed at the box office, whose staff set to with a will and in a surprisingly short time, issued all the refunds no doubt aided by the fact none of the tickets had been marked as used.

I will keep an eye on the advance City Screen listings for the revised ballet date, and it may be that while doing so, I will spot a film or an event I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.

The ballet disaster may result in City Screen getting my custom not once but twice.

I doubt if I will be going there by bus. I don’t know what happened to the 1.05pm bus, whether there wasn’t a driver, or it broke down. These things happen.

But someone in First York must know and they must have known at the time.

Why didn’t they tell the passengers waiting in the freezing wind and snow all along the route via the arrival boards?

Why did they leave passengers with the impression that the bus was coming?

As far as passengers are concerned, arrival boards are not a wish list of the services the company hopes to run. They’re there to list the buses that are actually running.

Passengers don’t care whether the bus arriving in 10 minutes is the 3pm bus running more than an hour late, or the 4.14pm bus on time. They only care that it arrives when the board says it will.

If a bus isn’t coming, they assume the board will either not list it or list it as “cancelled”.

It’s no good having super clever IT arrival boards if they don’t match the real buses.

As we boarded the bus, finally, on Sunday, I made a mental note that in future I should only believe times given in minutes on bus stop arrival boards.

I also ran through a mental inventory of the ways of getting into the city centre without the bus.

Customers and passengers should be told the bad news about the service they are buying as well as the good news.