A while ago RIPTA changed their bus pass system. Instead of getting a new pass made out of thin cardboard every month, you can get a plastic card that you keep permanently, reloading it with money every month.
In practice, the plastic is so cheap that it will eventually break. Once that happens the card can't be read by the sensors, so you have to get a new one. Which happened to me this week.
I found out that the store where I'd gotten these bus cards before didn't have any on-hand. What I was happy to learn is that RIPTA again has a customer service office in their downtown depot, and that the nice lady I used to buy bus passes from is back. So I bought a new card from her and transferred the funds from the old card.
Nice to see her. Also good to know that some more sanity is returning post-COVID.
2 comments:
It's very good to know some things have gone back to normal, including some sanity at RIPTA. I bet your were delighted to see the woman who sold you bus passes a few years ago was back at the counter.
At the same time we must admit that some things won't return to the kind of normal we knew before the lockdown. There will likely be a fair amount of confusion in the coming years but nothing like what happened a couple of years ago. That was a mistake, a very serious mistake, and I think people learned from having been subjected to all the controls the uberlords foisted on us. Now there's very little trust in non-local government or the media and that's not a bad thing.
Ignore the hall monitors of the world.
The fact that she remembered me as much as I remember her tells you something. There are people you kind of click with even though you only see them on the job. Anyway, yes, it's good to have her back where she was.
The distressing thing about the lockdown is that as obvious as it might be to you and me that it was a mistake, the people who put it in motion have no regrets. They still think that they were the heroes and there were just too many troublemakers around. I hope that more people have learned not to trust them. In a lot of ways the problem with the media is that there's too little of it. Much important stuff doesn't get reported or investigated at all, it's all centralized, so mostly what it's good for is reinforcing pre-set narratives.
Ignoring hall monitors is the best response to them.
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