I wonder how many commuters had to get penned before they realized this would be a problem...?On my commute into work on Tuesday, one of the robot turnstiles gagged on my new January Charlie pass and coughed it back out without letting me through. I tried to use it on two other robots, but neither would accept it. I went to talk to the MBTA person in the little Tpod. I got as far as telling her that my pass was being rejected and she told me, "Well, yeah. You've got to wait 20 minutes before you can use it again." Like I was caught. From that, I guessed that she assumed that I was using a pass that I'd just found or stolen or something. Nice.
I continued w the explanation and when I got across that the first machine never accepted the pass, she emerged from the pod to check things out. She asked for my pass and tried it in one of the robots, then said that she had to check the history on it. She took it over to one of the pass vending machines, punched in some kind of admin code, had it read my pass. Then something like a list of timestamps came up on the screen with some codes or words I couldn't make out from over her shoulder. Apparently it all checked out, and she returned my pass, directed me to the wheelchair-friendly turnstile, and let me through. I told her, "Thanks." She replied, "You're welcome." And when she turned to return to the pod, she found her path blocked by another commuter who told her that he'd been waiting for the wrong train, over on the opposite platform, and came over to the right side, but now his pass wasn't letting him through.
"Gotta wait 20 minutes."
"But..."
"Gotta wait 20 minutes."
Your experience may vary.
Keep on keepin on~
Oh, here's a picture of that T ad I commented on a while back...
That's from April 2005. Pretty early on in the evolution of the Charlie Pass, donchathink? I only ever saw the ad in Vietnamese. Odd.
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