It's the small things
For many years now, I have had a subsidized transit card, partially paid by my employer. It renewed monthly, but the cost to me was deducted directly from my pay and thus I never had to think about it.
This card is referred to as a CharlieCard, because several years ago, for some reason, some marketing genius decided the Kingston Trio's old "MTA" song -- which is critical of the subway fares, for pete's sake! -- was something they wanted to hook strongly to their brand identity. My personal theory is that the MBTA -- "the T," if you live here -- already had a perfectly fine thing to hang their identity on, which is their T-in-a-circle logo, and everybody was gonna call the damn things "T cards" anyway. Or, rather, "T cahds." My proposal was that the design of the face of the card contain two nice black-and-white line images: a cup of tea (or alternatively, someone tossing a crate of it into Boston Harbor), and a cod (possibly the Sacred Cod hanging in the State House). No text. None would be needed. Fine area historical references and a fine joke. But nooooo.
Around the beginning of the year, apparently they decided that system was working too well and severed relations with the company that was doing the subsidized card system, and instead changed to a Johnny-come-lately payment provider called Jawnt.
Now, Jawnt is also a good joke, and I appreciate a good joke. (Syntactic note: Both of these jokes are explained in pop-ins, so if you haven't figured out by now that active orange text in a paragraph is something you click on to reveal a digression or footnote, and then click again to make it go away, it's past time for you to figure that out.) But I really can't see how or why the MBTA went with them, unless a truckload of money was involved somewhere. Because the Jawnt system is far more complicated to deal with and Jawnt is one of those "solution in need of a problem" companies made by some techbro who doesn't think things through that's going to go out of business within five years and leave us subsidized-pass people stranded. This is an official prophecy.
In Philadelphia and environs, they have a word 'jawn' which apparently means everything and nothing. It's a "thingamajig" kind of word; some Philly-type person might say "pass me that jawn" where someone else might say "pass me that whatsit." It can also apparently be singular or plural as needed, and used for very loose concepts, not just a replacement for concrete nouns. Jawnt is a company based in that area, and they have merged it with the word "jaunt" -- get it? If you were from Philly this would be self-evident, but then, if you were from Boston, "tea cod" wouldn't need glossing either.
Jawnt is actually a service to maintain payment accounts. That is, they don't set you up with your T card directly. You set up the account/subsidy with Jawnt. Jawnt asks you to calculate how much you think you're going to need to spend each month for your public-transit needs. They put that much money in your drawing account every month, coming out of your pay but billing part of it to your employer. But they don't set up the card. What you then have to do is go order an auto-pay card sufficient unto your needs directly from the MBTA, and when you set up its autopay, you say "bill the Jawnt account" rather than some other bank account or credit card or what-have-you.
Confused? You will be, after this episode of SOAP.
As you can see, Jawnt really only exists to introduce unnecessary complexity. Furthermore, you have to be careful about the timing; the MBTA bills for the next month on the 15th of the month (I think -- it might be a little later than that -- it's a known, fixed date, though, whatever it is), so Jawnt has to make sure the new amount in the billing account arrives before then. (To their credit, Jawnt knows this and explains it very clearly in their materials, as part of the explanation of the amount of lead time you need to get started with this system.)
IN ADDITION, there is a third entity here -- Edenred, which apparently produces the physical T cards, and are the people who will be mailing your new T card to you. Edenred goes completely unnoted in any materials, so the envelope with the card in it arrives at your house with Edenred in the return address and absolutely no mention of the MBTA anywhere on the outside. If I hadn't received cards from them before -- they've been doing this long before Jawnt entered the picture -- I'd have been very confused.
OK, so. I set this up early this calendar year, and have been using the new system for several months without issue. Two days ago, a new card arrived in the mail from Edenred, unsolicited.
Now, these cards don't get replaced every month. They get replaced when they expire, which is something like four or five years -- that's the amount of use it takes for the cards to be deemed too physically worn out. (These are no longer magnetic-strip cards, they're prox cards and have been for quite a while, so actually I think you could probably get ten years or so out of them, but the MBTA is conservative about it.) The card I already had didn't expire until 2030.
This caused some confusion and anguish, as you can imagine. Which card should I use going forward? If I should switch to the new one, when should I do that? If it arrived on Saturday then Edenred probably only mailed it late last week, which would have been after the MBTA's billing cutoff, which means they don't intend this card to be used next month; it couldn't possibly have had any money put on it for that. Right? I hope? I don't know.
I wrote the MBTA's card customer service. I thought about actually visiting them in person, but they're open three hours a day on alternate Thursdays and they're in a basement behind a door with a sign that says BEWARE OF LEOPARD.
The email I got back from them this morning says "Well, we see that your active card is numbered ___, that looks OK to us, we have no idea why Edenred sent you another card, you'll have to ask them."
Only one problem. The number they gave in the email is the number of the NEW card.
And their web site, where I log in and check the details myself, says that the number of my active card is the number of the OLD card. Still does, as of three minutes before I began to type all this.
They can't both be right.
I guess what I'm going to have to do is carry both cards with me for at least several weeks and see every time I go to a fare gate which one is working, because that's the way life goes in the world where every change to every system is always in the service of making it worse.
27 July 2026