ORCA Monday

One good thing about penning email over the weekend is that one's Mondays can be filled with unintentional productivity even before one is fully organized to do real work. Granted, when it comes
to ORCA, RantWoman's standards for productivity are REALLY low. Today RantWoman received guidance that was not quite correct about the links she would see first. Then RantWoman hit one minor and one major obstacle before progress ground to a halt again.

RantWoman just received the following communication from ORCA customer service:

Good morning, Thanks for contacting us about your ORCA card. I apologize for the service you've received thus far and hope I can help.Your card is considered "registered" because we obtained your personal information as required by the Regional Reduced Fare Permit program. What we should have instructed you to do is to select "Yes, I have registered card" when you wanted to add it to your My ORCA account. As a result, you're unable to do this as the system keeps giving you the "card already registered" message. To fix this, unfortunately, you will have to create a new My ORCA account. This is the workaround until we find a better solution. The old username will remain in the database, but your card will be connected to the new one. I've listed a step-by-step process which should help you do this. 1. Go to http://www.orcacard.com/ home page2. Click on "Get ORCA now".3. In dialog box that appears, click on "Yes, I have a registered ORCA card." Click "Continue"4. In the new dialog box, enter the numbers from the front of the ORCA card just purchased and my zip code. Click "Continue"5. In the new dialog box, enter answer to my security question. Click "Continue"6. A new dialog box allows you to create a new account with ORCA..... I hope this helps out and I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Please contact us if you have any other questions.

RantWoman reports:
--Found the I have an ORCA card link. RantWoman suspects this is new somewhere in the intervening weeks since she first set off on this journey.

--Found the text about the Regional Reduced Fare Permit. RantWoman STRONGLY suggests redoing the UI so this info is on the TOP page and the user is guided about what to do so he or she does not already have to use this. RantWoman concedes the teensiest tiniest possibility of user error: RantWoman tends to read the minimum necessary on a web page and it's possible that she could have learned what is there sooner by reading the page herself. However, coming back to the point about what to put on the home page....

--Entered the requested numbers and secret code for RantWoman's card. RantWoman can hardly contain her thrill to have gotten this far, but wait:

--Enter zip code of mailing address? RantWoman's mailing address has a different zip code from her residential address. Try the mailing address first. Ix-nay. Try the home address. Success! Well yeah, except that will screw RantWoman up if any credit card info input does a zip code verification. Put that on the list and worry about it after...

--Enter answer to secret question asked when you received the card? WTF??? RantWoman does not remember even being asked. The computer wants her to enter her favorite food.

RantWoman would NEVER use that as a secret question just because her tastes in food are much too catholic and much too subject to the whim of whatever new interesting thing she has eaten lately. RantWoman always has to choose a secret question that refers to a historical fact: what year was your favorite composer / writer/ role model born? What was paternal grandmother's maiden name? Something like that. The main thing is RantWoman has to CHOOSE a category she can remember and then report the answer to the secret question.

At this point, RantWoman had two choices: reply to the email or TRY to talk to a human. Perhaps RantWoman should have replied to her email.
Enough said? The guy on the phone listened to RantWoman's question and then wrote down some information, more information that RantWoman thinks she should have had to give him. RantWoman THINKS he understands her problem and he promises to call back, so....