ORCA, Part 4

A couple things that haven't yet been mentioned in my saga of trying to get an ORCA card to work (See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for previous history):

1. I lost the card for more than a month. It was right after I purchased my second credit for it back in February. I did it from my laptop in bed just before going to sleep, and the next time I went looking for the card a couple days later, I couldn't find it. The card showed up in April on my desk. I think my wife found it someplace and moved it there, knowing I was looking for it. I still don't know where she found it.

This complicated my attempts to get resolution on having made this $20 credit purchase, which at that time appeared as "pending" on the ORCA card website, to say nothing of the $15 I'd spent which had never been acknowledged at all.

2. My first attempt to resolve this situation was via e-mail, back in early March (or maybe even February). I laid out the situation in brief, including the fact that the card had gone missing, and requested that the credits be applied to one of the other two ORCA cards we had and which appeared on our online account. The e-mailed response was simple and sunny: tap the card and all will be well. However, since we couldn't even find the card at that point, this response was no help at all. A polite request for further guidance to this "help" e-mail was never answered.

Needless to say, after trying three different methods to try and get resolution on this issue by mid-April (e-mail, talking with a representative at the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel's Westlake Station, and on hold for 15 minutes on the telephone), all of them fruitless, I was getting quite annoyed.