Today I went and got my defective Yearly Metcard ticket replaced. It stopped working a couple of weeks ago, after only 5 months, and I’ve finally got sick of having to find a human to get through the fare gates.
To get it replaced, you have to go to Flinders Street Station, find the door to the stationmaster’s office, and go up the stairs to the window.
The bloke behind the counter groaned — they’ve been getting a lot of these recently. He said the last guy had only had his for three weeks. According to a station host I’ve spoken to, a rogue batch of defective tickets are stuffing up numerous validators around the place, which in turn is passing their magnetic virus onto other tickets.
“Hopefully things will get better in 2007” the guy remarked. Ah, my friend, if only that were true. My ticket might work all year long, but I still expect to see fare evaders riding for free.
He asked me to fill in a form, and gave me a couple of weekly tickets to use while they process it. Then I’ll get the balance of my ticket in monthlies through the mail. This will give me a chance to use up the freebie dailies I got from compensation claims.
The weeklies are for all zones, even though my Yearly was only for Zone 1. I guess if I wanted to I could get a bonus trip to Frankston or Belgrave or somewhere. If only I had the time. Well, I’d have time on a weekend, but any weekly or longer ticket is valid in all zones on weekends anyway. Maybe I’ll save one of them for a public holiday jaunt.
3 replies on “The defective yearly”
It happened to me a couple of years ago (annual ticket not working)
But it has its advantages. If you can time it so that one of the monthly tickets they give you expires just before you take holidays, it means you don’t need to validate the next monthly until you come back to work. Hence you end the year with a monthly ticket left over. Maybe this will stop with the new ticketing system?
True, good point.
Though keep in mind given the cost of a Yearly is about 10.7 monthlies — less if you get the Yearly through Commuter Club — so it’s still better value buying Yearlies than Monthlies, even if the ticket never goes bung.
This is one of the few things the new ticketing system is expected to stop, yes.
I had a yearly ticket that died too.
It refused to work for two weeks.
Then it resurrected itself and has been working fine ever since.
Go figure.