So called Opal card problems had never came my way. I was an early adopter of the Opal card and I loved it! Easy, auto topped when my balance was low and life was great! I use to pompously snub my nose at the Neanderthals queued on Monday mornings buying their paper tickets while I tapped through on my way to the pepperit office.
That was, until the weekend when I tapped on and was told “Insufficient balance, $1.33”; that’s odd, I’ve had an auto top up running flawlessly since I received my Opal Card. I sheepishly bought a paper ticket, hoping that the people I snub didn’t notice me in the ticket queue.
THE OFFENDING OPAL CARD.
While on the train, I logged into to the Opal website and for some unknown reason, my auto top up was not active. Oh well, teething problems and all, I re-activated it and thought that would be the end of it. Come Monday, I logged into Opal again and was expecting to see that the auto top up had activated and I would be back to by nose snubbing best. But no, my low balance was still glaring at me.
What then?
Oh well, let’s lodge a support ticket with Opal explaining this one off furphy. I submitted my support ticket confident that this silly mess would be fixed in no time. That was until this morning when I received a reply saying: “Your support ticket needs to be re-submitted via the secure area of our website so we can know more details about your account”.
Strange, I could have sworn I lodged my support ticket with Opal while I was logged in. So running out of options, I rang Opal. Wow, talk about a phone menu! If you’re not lightening on the keys, it’s near impossible to type in your Opal card number before they hang up on you.
Restoring my faith in Opal, I was put through to a very helpful, clear to understand operator who had a look at my account and was unable to tell me why my original auto top up had been removed. I asked him why my new auto top up hadn’t done it’s job and topped up my account. This is where I wen’t down the rabbit hole and realised why people hate Opal! Are you ready?!?
The Opal card problems
- The auto top up doesn’t kick in until you swipe to take a journey.
- I can’t swipe to take a journey because my balance is too low.
- I need to manually add credit to my Opal card.
- To manually add credit via the Opal website, I need to first cancel my auto top up.
- I can then manually add credit.
- I can then re-add (third time lucky) my auto top up
“Wow, Ok…. Could you put me through to someone to leave some feedback please sir?”
“Sorry sir, but you can leave feedback via the Opal website by lodging a support ticke……….”
My screams of frustration drowned out the end of the gentleman’s sentence. After I get down with this mess, I’ll be back to snubbing my nose those paper ticket holders in no time!
