Thursday, January 25, 2007

I've lost my BART wits after vacation!

Sort of embarrassing to share this experience but since I make fun of others, it is only fair that I make fun of myself!!

After a 2-week commute hiatus, I seem to have lost my quick moves and passenger efficiency. This morning, I actually tried to walk through the ticket gates without pulling my ticket out first! The man behind me even made a "tsk" sound after I cluelessly wondered why I can't walk through. Took me 2 seconds (too long to wait for a daily BART commuter) to realize that I needed to pull out my ticket first. How embarrassing...I've become someone I usually get annoyed at.

Then, an even more clueless thing happened. Usually, I know exactly when Civic Center station is up. I know by heart that it is 4 and a half minutes from Embaradero, and 40 seconds from Powell. This morning, I somehow "lost count" and got up to stand by the door AFTER Civic Center. I was all ready to dash out the door...but I started to realize the train is still moving and not stopping after 40 seconds, 1 minute, 1.5 minutes.

Whoa, I thought, did I actually miss the stop?? Sadly, I did. I ended up at 16th street and had to wait for the next downtown bound train (4 minutes away) and missed my company shuttle.

I have no one to blame but myself. What happened to me? Pretty funny actually. I usually am quite proud of my BART wits and quickness, but it appears that I need a couple days to get it back after a 2 week break.

4 comments:

Josh said...

You should sign up for BART's EZ-Rider card. No longer do you have to wait for a ticket to spit back up out of the machine. It actually speeds up the process of going through the fare gates. Even better still, no need to keep buying new tickets and hoping that you aren't delayed at the machine and miss your train. I've been using it for a few months now, and it is excellent.

bartmusings said...

Do you know if EZ Rider cards can be "charged" by commuter checks?

I really need to start looking into that!

Josh said...

They don't take commuter checks yet. Not sure if they ever will... Doesn't affect me so much, as my employer reimburses me directly, I just show them a copy of my credit card statement with the EZ-Rider charges.

I have a stack of commuter checks from elsewhere that I need to redeem. I'm hoping if I hold out long enough (but not past the expiry), I can apply them to my EZ-Rider balance.

Linton, if you are reading this, please let them know: We'd like to be able to apply Commuter Checks to our EZ-Rider blances. Thank you. :-)

boopiejones said...

That's pretty funny. I want to know where you went on vacation that you could end up so relaxed and out of touch with "the real world." Where ever it was, I want to go there for my next vacation...