A dumb experience with a 'Smart Card'

Recently I was travelling from my native back to Chennai when I happened to meet my onsite coordinator from my previous project who was going back to Chennai in the same train as mine. I had not seen him in person before (Oh well he was in the US busy outsourcing work to us) but I recognized him from a team pic I’d seen sometime back.

Talking about onsite coordinators in the IT field, they’re these special people at work whom we would’ve never seen but interestingly spend hours talking to- about some client requirement of course. But yes, a software engineer on an average spends a minimum of 5-6 hours a week talking to his/her onsite coordinator. It is sometimes interesting to think that you can actually argue, fight and make up with someone you have never ever seen. Yeah, interesting role these onsite coordinators play in our lives! :p

Now, coming to my story, I met my onsite coordinator SK at the station, talked for five minutes there, boarded the train and reached our destination and got off at the Chennai Central station on a Monday morning. We did not see each other while getting off the train (we happened to travel in different compartments) and I just made my way to the local metro station right across the road to catch my train to work. The Chennai metro let me tell you is incredibly efficient and you got trains coming in every 10-15 minutes to take you anywhere in Chennai. But I must say the ticket queues can be pretty frustrating at times. There have been times when I’ve had to strain real hard to find out where the queue ends (Ya ok. Go ahead and blame my height for that! But it is indeed a tedious task to get the ticket!)

To provide some relief to the people waiting in long queues, they introduced train ticket vending machines in important stations and my station had two of them. You get these magnetic cards called ‘Smart Cards’ which you can recharge and use to vend tickets from it. Generally, there won’t be huge queues in front of these vending machines. So I decided to vend my ticket from the machine as I sneered past all those people who did not have ‘smart’ cards and were waiting in the long queue for their tickets. As I walked towards the machine, I found SK there waiting in the queue. Out of courtesy I waved my smart card at him and said I’ll help him get his ticket too. He happily got off the queue and we walked up to the vending machine. I noticed one of those machines was not working. Giving SK a confident smile, I used my card in its twin and the worst happened! It gave me a message in red saying ‘Sorry this machine is out of order’.

To me, it read ‘You really look like a jackass now!’ I gave SK a sheepish smile. He seemed a bit annoyed at me. He had almost reached the ticket counter when I deterred him from his mission and steered him into attaining absolutely nothing! Oh yes I would be surprised he wasn’t pissed at me for that!

Yet again, I suggested to him that we go and join the queue which had by then increased kilometers-fold. I guess he wasn’t open to any more of my suggestions. He said he was gonna take a bus back home, trying to hide all his irritation. I picked up my backpack and sadly walked to the end of the queue trying my best not to look at a single person whom I had sneered at before.

Things never work when you really really want them to. I have experienced this kind of a thing many a times before and this incident was just a repetition.

Smart cards they call it!

Ha! I don’t think so.

Or why blame the card. They should make smarter machines to use them I guess!!!!