Unlike St. Louis, it’s possible to get places on public transit in the Washington D.C. area.
At the start of each day we added value to our Metro Smart Cards, buying the full day pass. (With 22 years of college among the four of us, figuring out how to use the wall-sized machine wasn’t too hard.)
Using their Metro, with subways/light rail and busses, my wife and I (along with another couple) went from Arlington, Virginia to the Smithsonian buildings our first day, thence out to the ballpark to watch St. Louis beat-up on the Nationals.
The second day we ventured out to the Dulles Airport home of the expanded Air and Space collection. In that deceptively monster building a Boeing 707, a Concorde airliner, a space shuttle, the B-29 Enola Gay and a couple of hundred other planes, helicopters and a pair of blimp gondolas don’t seem all that crowded.
Anyway, all went well – until we transferred from the subway to the 983 bus on the way to see the planes. As we saw others do, we touched our cards to the pad on the farebox: where other cards made the box “beep,” we four got a stern sound like the old Operation game. We tried again, still screech. My friend showed his receipt from that card machine and the driver let us ride to the museum.
From the museum I called the Customer Service number on the back of the Smart Card. Big mistake.
After prompting my way to a human being (no easy task), a woman told me she couldn’t help me since my card wasn’t ‘registered.’
Say again?
In small print on the back of the card it tells of the option of registering your Smart Card. That requires visiting a website. I asked the Metro representative why if registering the cards was so important, that information wasn’t on the wall-size machine where cards are bought or value is added. She again told me I had to register my card before she could help me.
Well, the website noted didn’t have an easy link to register a card. I called back, getting a different customer service person but the same answer.
Try three: in the McDonalds inside the museum (just $8.49 for two cheeseburgers and two drinks), I called customer service while my wife sat next to me with her iPhone at the ready. The man who answered gave us the same website. My wife pointed out that what he told us to click wasn’t there. To his credit, he pulled out his iPhone and tried the site – and realized we were right. He gave us another website to try.
Yes, there we could finally register our cards. All we had to do is give them our names, phone numbers, e-mail, password, employer, and, set-up three security questions (What was the mascot of your high school? for example), then we could enter the 20 digit card number and await an authorization code to be sent by e-mail…
Three new problems. 1) their system didn’t accept an e-mail address ending in .net; 2) I only had one “special character” in my proposed password – the “s” at the end of the description of what’s acceptable meant each password had to include at least two numbers, two lower case and two upper case letters and two special characters; and, 3) having started an application with my non-accepted e-mail I couldn’t start a new application because that non-functioning account already existed.
Almost three million Americans have “Customer Service” jobs according to the federal government , a growing field where the average wage runs between $24,000 and $34,000 a year [www.snagajob.com; www.salary.com <http://www.salary.com> ; www.bls.gov <http://www.bls.gov> ], meaning a full time working mom in the field with two kids could still get food stamps and free school meals for the kids.
Yet, while the pay isn’t great Customer Service jobs make or break an organization. Every bad Call Center experience stings. As I’ve said many times, here in Missouri I strongly suspect a potent factor in the decline in citizens getting benefits like Medicaid and food stamps is the horrid operation of the Department of Social Services’ Call Centers.
Finally, with one last call – where I started by demanding to speak to a Supervisor and waited for that privilege – we got answers. The problem wasn’t with our cards, exactly. Even though the suburban Virginia busses take Smart Cards, they are not included in the all-day pass rate. We were supposed to add a special, additional amount to the cards specifically for the bus. I noted that wasn’t clear at the machine, and, the cards had a subway car and a bus on the front to them…The supervisor agreed with me but that’s the way it is.
We paid $2.00 each for a bus ride to Dulles where we took an airport Metro express bus to the Metro station where we caught the subway to the ballpark. I don’t think our cards made the correct “beep” but the driver let us on anyway.
After cold beers and good bar food, we watched the Cards again take-out the Nats. So, in the end, it was a good day. I just could have done without that frustrating part in the middle.
Glenn