A public service announcement from the people who don't tell you things when they should.
My Myki card has been misbehaving of late. It's not like I use my myki very often - once or twice a week it gets used when I go into town.
If you don't live in Melbourne, you won't know about Myki. It's our public transport ticketing system. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Your card can go dead without notice. Cash top ups it seems to take forever to load. The rollout was badly handled. It's the red-headed stepchild of public transport tickets.
Regardless, I don't mind the old Myki, until it goes to shit. I do tap on and of the trams and it's no drama - until the last few weeks. Maybe it's just me, but when I've tried to tap onto the train - and it is normally the train when this happens, the gates haven't been letting me through. It will often take three, or four or ten taps to get the gates to open. There is money on my Myki - I know this. It's on an automatic top up. And it works sometimes, but not others.
Last night, coming home from the cinema with my kid brother, I attempted to go through the barriers with my myki. After ten taps I went to the ticket office. And yes, this is an anomaly in Melbourne as there are few manned stations on the network. Being at Melbourne Central, there was somebody to talk to.
The nice man at the station listened as I told him how my card was refusing to tap on, even though it was registered and topped up. I could tap on a multitude of times, but it was always reading red and not letting me through. It was annoying, especially as I knew that there was money on the card.
The man smiled at me.
"You know you don't have to touch the card on the reader? Just wave it in front of it. That's all you do."
"But we tap on."
"Not any more. You only need to wave it. I talk to about ten people a day about this. "
"Since when?"
"About three months ago."
"Were we told about this?"
"I'm not sure."
And okay, it's not like I'm going to read every last thing that comes from Metro Trains or Yarra Trams, but it would be nice of them to put out a PSA telling you that you don't actually have to tap your card on the reader to make the bloody thing work.
This has been driving me nuts for months.
You also learn something new every day.
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