So I signed up for a "free" Myki

I think it’s fairly offensive to call something that every single Victorian is paying hundreds of dollars for “free”, but that’s not the point here. There’s a promotion now where for a limited time, anyone can sign up for a Myki card that you don’t have to pay for. Directly. Anyway, we filled out the form. The cards arrived today. Very exciting! 

Until we read the letters. Turns out they’re concession Mykis, not regular ones. Two things are apparent from this mixup, one obvious and one not-so-obvious: The obvious: Their web signup system is just as fucked as the rest of the system. No big surprise there.

The not-so-obvious: Being a concession or non-concession traveller is tied to the card itself. This means that when your concession status changes, you need to get a new card. If it changes regularly (for example, if you’re only able to find temporary work), you’ll need to get a new Myki card every time the status changes, since you can’t have two cards registered to the same person at the same address (I tried). You think that’s bad? Check out the procedure to fix it:

I rang the Myki support line, 13 MYKI (cute, huh?). The nice guy who answered the phone told me that there have been a few problems with the cards (no shit, Sherlock). He took my details, including the entire 15-digit card number, and told me that someone would be getting back to me within 24 hours to fix the problem. Excellent. Why couldn’t he fix it himself? I’m anticipating a few more embarrassing cost overruns.