Breeze Card
I added $40 on my Breeze card the other day (in the morning) and got a convoluted stupid email:
NOTE: Please remember that online purchases are available to load by tapping your Breeze card on a MARTA bus, rail station gate or vending machine 3 hours after the completion of your purchase; Allow a minimum of 12 hours for fare upload for Mobility service.
Actually, I got two copies because you can’t load $40 all at once — so I did two $20’s.
As the afternoon wore on and my credits didn’t appear online, I weighed my confidence in the system* vs. my desire to get home that night, and decided to go to the MARTA rail station vending machine and tap my breeze card. There was *no* selection on the screen for “load an online purchase” so I selected “check breeze card balance.” I tapped my card and the screen blinked & flashed like it was about to reboot and then displayed a message: “$20 has been automatically added to your account.”
Christ.
So I checked my balance again and the $40 was there. I guess it can only send one message at a time so the final $20 message was what I saw. Maybe during that blinking it sent the first message?
But.
Plus, I hope you caught that: “Automatically?” What the hell? I actually had to reread it several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Really, they might as well have said “magically” for all the word added to my experience.
I mean, it worked and I should STFU right?
No. The designers of this system are idiots.
*Previously, I had loaded the card online and ignored the non-communicative e-mail. I mean I read it but it didn’t really tell me anything about what I needed to do, and the credits appeared on my card almost immediately so I didn’t worry. I was curious about what would happen when I “loaded” the purchase by “tapping” it on the fare box, but when I tapped the card on the fare box that evening, it just subtracted my fare and I went home. I guess I’m lucky I didn’t take the import of the e-mail to mean, I was supposed to do a tap to load. I can easily see scenarios where if I was a slightly more neurotic [HA! — ed.] I would have wound up inadvertently having a fare subtracted as I tried to “load” my purchase by “tapping.”
