Heading to Boskone

Well, after work we're headed there. mabfan and I will be at Boskone this weekend. You can find us at any of mabfan's panels, or in the Con Suite Saturday night, or around the con. We're not going to any of the parties and the like, due to it still being mabfan's shloshim, but we'll be around, so please do track us down if you want to say hi.

New hotel, which means more getting lost on the way to panels.

"Improved," "Upgraded" Service

This morning, I took the bus, as usual, from Harvard St. to Harvard Square and then transfered to the Red Line to go to Kendall. Or, at least, that was the plan. I got the bus (after a longish, Very Cold wait) and used my Monthly Link Pass just fine. But when I got to Harvard (Church St. entrance), the automated fare gate wouldn't read my pass properly. It read my Link Pass as a Stored Value Card. Not only that, it told me it didn't have sufficient value on it.

Thank goodness, thought I, there was an attendant there. She opened the gate for me and asked me what was wrong.

"It's reading my pass as a Stored Value Card, even though it's a Monthly Link Pass," I said. "And it worked just fine when I boarded the bus a bit ago."

"Well, that's the problem," she said. "You can't use it so soon after just using it."

"But I do it every morning. And I know that the threshold to reuse is 15 minutes, and it's been much more than that," I said.

"Well, I can't tell you anything until I see the pass."

Just then, another official -- one I've known for a while -- walked past.

"How're you?" she asked.

"Pretty well, except that my Link Pass is registering as a Stored Value card and claims I don't have enough value on it."

"Oh," she said. "That happens sometimes. Don't worry about it." And then she headed into the official's booth, so I headed down the stairs to get my train.

But it bothered me that my pass wasn't working properly, so I called the T's Customer Service line and told the person who answered it the above story (up to the bit about the second official.)

"Oy. I don't know what sorts of idiots they're hiring there," the phone person said. She then transfered me to the Automated Fare Collection office. Where I got someone's voicemail, so I left a message.

I then called the T's complaint line to complain about the disinformation that the (first) official at Harvard was passing on. And the line rang and rang and rang and rang, with no voice mail or human picking up.

Is this sort of treatment what they meant when they said the improvements will bring "enhanced" customer service? If so, I'd like my old, classic, benign neglect back, please.

ETA: A follow-up

An Update -- Excellent Customer Service

Well, that's better.

After this morning's debacle, I called the T's customer service line and left voicemail for the office that deals with automatic fare collection (AFC, or, in other words, Charlie Card) issues.

About ten minutes ago, the guy on whose voicemail I'd left the message called me back. Not only did he express sympathy for what had happened this morning, he looked up my card (reporting that it was, in fact, registering as a Link Pass in the system), checked the usage history from this morning (explaining that he had the Rapid Transit info in his system but the bus info had to wait until it was downloaded directly from the fareboxes on the buses -- something that happens once each day), and reported that it must have been gate error, since the system had me going through the gate at Harvard at 7:21 AM this morning.

He then gave me the correct spelling of his last name and his direct office phone number and told me I should call him if I ever had another problem with the AFC system. He was also concerned that I had been unable to reach the T's complaint line and said he was going to look into that once he got off the phone with me (not that I expect any follow up on that, but he sounded very surprised that no one was manning those phones).