I love the creative ways language can be used. Like this message from Washington State Ferries:
Subject: Improvements to Fare Collection Policy
Eliminating checks and Canadian currency as forms of payment.
Separating the senior/disabled fare into two categories and offering new ReValue cards for senior or disabled customers.
Removing discounted single round-trip fares (senior, disabled, youth) from kiosks and the WSF Web site.
The first is certainly not an improvement for people who write checks, but at least we’ll no longer need to worry about all those Canadians trying jam up the American monetary system with their loonies and toonies.
The second must be an accounting move, unless those eligible for senior and disabled fares objected to being lumped together. There is no double discount for disabled seniors, so which ticket should disabled seniors ask for? It might be an interesting sociological experiment to camp out in a toll both and record how such customers self-identify. Or should they leave it up to the discretion of the ticket seller? No pressure there: I was once at Denny’s when the waitress started to automatically add the senior discount for a customer clearly in his seventies, so that he’d been eligible for the discount for the better part of a couple of decades was not a secret. He was not pleased: “No discount!”
The third is my favorite. When buying passenger tickets at home or at a kiosk, there were few regular-fare passengers because there was no one physically checking the ticket against the eligibility of the ticket holder for the fare class, hence many people buying a ticket at home bought a discounted senior, disabled, or youth ticket. Regular ferry commuters have gotten screwed so often for so long that traditional societal mores assume a sort of moral flexibility when it comes to cheating the system. Be left waiting on the dock for the next ferry more than an hour away one too many times because Vashon gets all the love in the form of loading priority and more ferries, and you start to think the system owes you. One would have thought this loophole would have been addressed in the brainstorming sessions.
In ferry system’s defense, they didn’t say who the improvements would benefit.
