Opus

In my town the powers that be are intending to do away with the lowly strip of bus and commuter train tickets. Billions of dollars were spent on study after study for a few years and the result was the Opus Card. A credit card size piece of plastic with a little chip in it that allows you to load it with certain numbers of tickets. The price of this environment saving genius is $7.00 (before tickets are bought and added on) but for a limited time they are offering it at $3.75. I bought one a while ago and was astonished to find that I couldn't load both bus tickets and commuter train tickets on the same card. Lo! Those billions of dollars spent on studies did not go to waste, they figured they would recoup some of that by making us (the ignorant public) buy two or more cards for different services. These cards have been proven to be extremely fragile and have been fraught with problems since their release amongst the unsuspecting masses. And if they aren't already, they should be a sore spot for those who designed and produced them. My own experience has not been limited to realizing I need two separate cards to get to work as last week (the day after I had just loaded it with twelve new bus/metro tickets), it failed to perform when I boarded my bus. It squawked and made a series of red "alert' lights flash on the machine that is to read it. I tried and re-tried and then tried again. Luckily, the bus driver did not throw me off and instead told me to sort it out once we arrived at the metro. In this circus-like state of a city I live in, it stands to reason that our transportation cards would be named after a herring-eating, tuba-playing, white-brief-clad paranoid penguin from bloom county. Berke Breathed would be proud.