Since today is the 15th of the month and I always buy my pass on the 15th of the month, I figured I would take a mini-trip to the FVM’s at Kenmore to buy my monthly pass. But this month I decided to pay with cash.
So after a wonderfully cramped ride from Packard’s Corner to Kenmore, I exit to the FVM’s to discover the 3 machines that take cash were all out of service (hopefully they were functioning yesterday because the Red Sox were playing). The Customer Service Agent (CSA) was too busy talking on his phone to care that the machines were down.
So I re-enter the system and get off at Hynes Convention Center, where one of the 2 cash-accepting FVMs wasn’t taking bills. Not so convenient when you need to throw $59 into a machine. Luckily the bill-accepting machine was alive and well and the process was fairly smooth, in fact it was smoother than my previous experiences using credit/debit cards, as the machine accepted all of my bills on the first try (two $20’s, a $10, seven $1’s and two dollar coins). It’s much easier to feed the machine $20’s than to fight with it as it consistently rejects my attempts to use credit cards.
It’s too bad the MBTA has more credit/debit accepting machines than cash accepting machines.
