On the way to Metro Center station, I spied some lovely carving tucked into the wall of the National Press Building that I just had to capture.
Once at the station, the Smartrip card on the phone where the three-day pass was clearly visible still stubbornly refused to open the turnstile gates after being tapped. Yet another station manager (at least much nicer this time) spent a couple of minutes trying to diagnose the problem but ultimately ended up passing me through the gate.
I rode the Red Line to Farragut North for one last attempt at sorting out the phone/pass situation with the same results no matter what I tried. The fare machines wouldn’t activate the pass, the turnstiles wouldn’t open to save my life.
The nicest station manager of them all offered to once again allow me to bypass the gates but at this point I’d had my fill of going through this hassle every time entering and leaving a station so I went ahead and sprung for a one day Smartrip physical card which I knew would work.
The fare machine coughed up a very pretty one showing the cherry blossoms (which I had missed the peak by a week and a half) and my subway woes were finally done, or so I thought. It turns out that they can’t issue a refund for the three day pass I was never able to use until it expires in a month.
Whoever designed the IT system backing Metro’s operations must have truly despised the poor people who have to actually use it. So many stupid design decisions that cannot be overridden by supervisory personnel absolutely beggars belief!
I can visualise the design meetings with some sort of “business expert” coming up with these Kafkaesque rules of operations and no one having the power to hit them upside the head with a tack hammer because they’re a complete moron.
But at least with a working card, I rode the rails some more (I do rather like trains) ending up at Union Station which is nowhere near the bustling terminal I remember it to be. Very few of the food court vendors were open (though I’ll confess that large lemonade from Chick-Fil-A in the belly of Union Station really hit the spot after lots of wandering and very little hydration!).
Having accomplished what I wanted to and had epiphanies anyone going round on Walkabout would have been proud of, it was time to head back to the hotel to try to get some rest before the final visit and subsequent push toward home tomorrow.
