ORCAmania time; Bermuda Triangle still in range for Early Adopters

RantWoman is leading an extremely adventure-filled life. For example, although RantWoman herself has been paying no attention at all to monthly bus stickers for months, all week, RantWoman has been having conversations with her bus-riding, Regional Reduced Fare Permit using friends about the demise of the Metro monthly stickers and the need for ORCA card holdouts to hie themselves thither toward the Metro offices and the brave new world of ORCA.

RantWoman finds it easy to sound encouraging. Everyone RantWoman has talked to so far already has a permanent Reduced Fare Permit. RantWoman knows from a little too much time recently spent standing in line that permanent permits are well-recorded in Metro computers and RantWoman's groupies can show up with photo ID and some modest cash sum and walk out with their brand new ORCA-friendly RRFP in almost no time.

Even better, so far everyone RantWoman has talked to is already plugged into the swirls and eddies of the worldwide information revolution, including both the internet and online banking. Everyone RantWoman has talked to grumbles about the required trip to Metro offices but is quite excited to hear about being able to load subsequent monthly passes online. This is good because RantWoman has otherwise heard a few grumbles from people who live far from downtown Seattle and who deeply lament their newly discovered inability to buy bus stickers at their nearby pharmacy or corner grocery.

Urk! Well, RantWoman has been forgetting to mention one vexatious subtlety about creating accounts on http://www.orcacard.com/ : Regional Reduced Fare Permits are already registered so WHEN ONE CREATES ONE'S http://www.orcacard.com/ account, one has to START by choosing the option saying "I have a Registered Card" from the homepage and then follow the directions here:
https://www.orcacard.com/ERG-Seattle/p7_025.do?m=5

RantWomen mentions this subtlety only because she is now up to THREE different http://www.orcacard.com/ sign-ins because of not following directions previously as well as this year's trip to the Bermuda Triangle :

RantWoman exaggerates. She herself has not been to the Bermuda Triangle. Nor unfortunately has a lot of oil still gushing out of a certain deep water well in the Caribbean. However, a modest sum of money in RantWoman's ORCA wallet still might as well be in the Bermuda Triangle . RantWoman, sigh, is PARTLY responsible for this long excursion: RantWoman misplaced her old ORCA card at a key point and then dawdled weeks longer about putting said token of fare status into the mail.

Last week, RantWoman exchanged more email with Very Helpful Human. Very Helpful Human had not received RantWoman's mail and made a specific trip to the mailroom to retrieve the envelope. Very Helpful Human did the next step before going on a well-deserved vacation. She sent RantWoman email indicating that the necessary electronic steps had been taken and that within a day or two, RanWoman's modest ORCA wallet should be transferred to her new card.

Very Helpful Human told RantWoman it might take a couple days for the transaction to get to the ORCA readers and that the funds should get transferred when RantWoman, as she is regularly wont to do, taps her card on one of the many ORCA readers in her life. Very Helpful Human also left RantWoman the name and phone number of Very Helpful Human #2 available to assist RantWoman during Very Helpful Human's absence.

RantWoman has checked the status of her funds on http://www.orcacard.com/ . The transaction is indeed pending. It has been pending for several days while RantWoman has been tapping away on all sorts of buses with her ORCA card. Today, RantWoman placed a call to Very Helpful Human #2. Very Helpful Human returned RantWoman's call and left an encouraging message on RantWoman's voicemail. RantWoman guesses she is encouraged. Besides RantWoman has another transaction she also awaits.

RantWoman recently took a ferry trip fraught with conversations about topics not nearly as explosive as they sounded . RantWoman remembers passing through the ORCA readers, not hearing a beep indicating her card had been read and / or not having the gates open until she swiped her card a second time. RantWoman later reviewed her transaction record and discovered she had been charged twice for the same ferry ride. Metro customer service forwarded RantWoman's question about this to the Washington State Ferry system and RantWoman is expecting a credit to her ORCA wallet any day now.

All this anticipation....


Stop! Time out! Wait a second! The message from Very Helpful Human #2 caused RantWoman's Programmer Brain to kick in. Programmer Brain is kind of in limbo due to RantWoman's struggles to make Programmer Brain work well with Mr, JAWS. RantWoman is also making wild guesses that might or might not have anything to do with the architecture and capacity of the part of the ORCA system that distributes passenger pass information to ORCA readers. With all those disclaimers, RantWoman offers the following bout of free consulting which may or may not be relevant to anything.

RantWoman assumes that what the card readers need to process fares most of the time is really simple. RantWoman is not even going to comment on that.

RantWoman assumes that when it comes to loading monthly passes or downloading esoteric once in a blue moon transactions like retrieving the funds due to RantWomans ORCA wallet from next to the Bermuda triangle, that needs are kind of complex and that hopefully there enough transactions possibly to have loading capacity problems somewhere in the chain of things that need to get transferred. Okay, RantWoman has absolutely no basis in actual knowledge of the ORCA system but RantWoman is shamelessly going to guess anyway.

RantWoman's point: RantWoman most of the time rides only a few routes. Every once in awhile RantWoman deviates from her usual comings and goings, but there are whole swaths of ORCA card readers that probably do not need to load RantWoman's monthly pass info and certainly not the esoteric once in a blue moon thing involving her old ORCA wallet. Chances are extremely high that when RantWoman needs to download her monthly pass info, she is either going to do it from one of the routes she rides all the time close to home OR from something in the vicinity of the last route she rode the night before.

RantWoman is going to be an agnostic about whether it is creepy to have the ORCA pass loading process check the routes a given customer regularly rides and prioritize those for loading pass purchase info. RantWoman does not really care only because she can make a good case that this might make sense from a nice impersonal system management perspective that 99% of the time should be invisible to the public.

RantWoman is not even going to ask whether there is some good reason it's a bad idea that there might be different sets of pass purchase transactions loaded on the readers for different routes. RantWoman also knows that different bus numbers get switched around for different routes and supposes that if she is onto something that has to be taken into account. For instance, RantWoman might divide her pass-loading process and target all the buses at the Metro base(s) where her most frequently ridden routes originate. In short RantWoman is a data exploration geek. IF the problem getting RantWoman's pass loaded is some kind of system capacity issue that affects more people than just RantWoman, RantWoman MIGHT be tempted to play around with data and then make adjustments accordingly to load processes. Well, RantWoman MIGHT do this....