myki
“Can we bring the state to a standstill, from Warrnambool to Mallacoota? Yes, we can!”
myki is a contactless smartcard public transport ticketing system invented for Melbourne, Australia but now used throughout the state of Victoria.
myki was conceived in an underground Paris bunker by Generals of the French armed forces in 1940. These senior military officials had just negotiated their umpteenth consecutive wartime surrender, in a national record of fifteen minutes, a swiftness that gave them enough time, prior to their inevitable capture and execution, to create an incomprehensible matrix of bureaucracy that could one day be marketed to an inept Australian State Government.
myki was first introduced in late 2007 and should be fully operational within the next half century, at which time users should at least be able to seamlessly board a tram.
myki is not capitalised under any circumstances, especially at the start of a sentence. It is not derived from some aboriginal word for something.
Concept
The myki ticket is derived from the mass-transport ticketing system of nearby Brisbane, which is the hoky poki. The differences are as follows:
myki
|
hoky poki
|
|---|---|
| Buy a myki card. | Put your right hand in. |
| Top-up online, at the station, at thousands of retail outlets, or anywhere where illegally harvested kidneys can be exchanged for myki money. | Put your right hand out. |
| Touch-on when you leave point A. | Put your right hand in, and shake it all about. |
| Touch-off when you arrive at point B. | Do the hokey pokey if you wish, but putting your right hand in and shaking it all about again will be more effective. |
| Log on to the myki website and see how much you’ve been overcharged. | ♪♪ That’s what it’s all about. ♪♪ |
Pairing each "touch-on" with a "touch-off" is modeled after a recent unsuccessful effort of the U.S. Immigration system, and aims to identify riders who are trapped inside the system, who can then be offered welfare benefits and discounts to attend the university. However, in most cases where patrons fail to leave the system on schedule, these riders are found on the tracks, engaged in a related activity known as hanky panki.
Technical details
myki operates in a similar way to other successful electronic ticketing systems around the globe, like Hong Kong’s Octopus, Tokyo’s Burret-Tlain, and London’s Oyster. But myki has many exclusive features that outclass its international rivals:
Instead of transmitting data electronically over state-of-the-art gigabyte LANs, myki uses severely inebriated elderly carrier pigeons to transmit transaction details from the source to a central aviary server. Online top-ups for short-term tickets are processed within 24 hours, or when Halley’s Comet becomes visible to the naked eye, whichever comes later. Necessary refunds are processed within 14 days, or when several stars align.
Because of these technical innovations, riders can watch four suitable trains arrive and depart from any station on the network whilst waiting for a myki reader to acknowledge their touch-on, and can experience severe malnutrition whilst waiting for a myki reader to acknowledge their touch-off. World Vision have filmed adverts at various Melbourne train stations with a view to raising 100,000,000 Bangladeshi taka to aid these stranded Victorians.
Tourism
myki provides the perfect solution for tourists, business travelers, and anyone else who finds it unavoidable to visit Melbourne. Upon arriving at Melbourne's Tullamarine airport, visitors can purchase a Visitor Pack for a mere AUD$1,000. This permits two hours' travel on the only public transport route that visits the airport: the vomit-soiled 901 bus bound for Frankston. Visitors who choose this option must top-up their myki card at some point during the 3½-hour journey.
More savvy travelers will spend $2,000 for a one-way ticket on the always punctual Melbourne SkyBus, $3,000 for a taxi driven by an illegal Pakistani immigrant who has been languishing in the airport holding yard for three weeks, or $4,000 for a stylish private limousine in which the hirer will be dismembered and his bloodied body parts scattered around Sunbury.
Financing
The original contract for myki was valued at $494,000,000, which works out to a lazy $141 for each taxpayer in the state of Victoria. All of those taxes were paid to the Federal Government, which returned only 10% of the federal revenue to Victoria due to its geographical insignificance and its shithouse choice of contractors.
The myki budget gradually tripled to $1,500,000,000. When its boosters saw all those zeros, their minds saw only lots of train wheels. Victorian taxpayers refused to believe that $2,883 per capita went to fund a clusterfucked ticketing system which occasionally let them pay again to board trains, trams, and buses that their taxes had already paid for.
Perhaps it was having three LEDs above the screen on each myki terminal that led to the cost overruns. Or perhaps it was the number of industrial design consultants it took to agree on the putrid shade of green.
Corporate sponsorship
Most of the $1-billion budget blowout was actually spent to promote Victoria, Victorian people, and everything Victorian about Victoria, including all of the following:
- Shane Warne, an outer-eastern suburb drug-addicted bogan with a propensity for adultery and baked beans, who somehow wooed a legendary supermodel.
- GWS Giants. An AFL team consisting entirely of underdeveloped 12-year-olds created purely to make the Melbourne Football Club look competitive.
- Melbourne Storm. A relatively successful NRL team, until fans outside Victoria got evidence of their systematic cheating.
- Cadel Evans, who is regarded as Victorian despite being born in Western Australia and raised in New South Wales. Because Victorians love cheats.
- Marina Prior, a nice Victorian lady, sponsored solely to break the sporting trend.
That each of the above were labelled as "Sponsored by myki" does not prove that they are crap. It only gives Victorians alternatives to concluding that myki is crap.
Fare evasion
Adherence to myki’s terms and conditions is policed by a group of semi-trained Neanderthals brought through a time portal to a world where everything works exactly as it is supposed to, otherwise known as ticket inspectors. Thanks solely to this measure, fare evasion plummeted to the dizzying low of 9% by 2013. By the same time, damn-you-dirty-apes-damn-you-all-to-hell was up to 45%, of-course-I-touched-on-you-stupid-knuckle-dragger increased to 67%, and how-do-you-propose-I-top-up-this-lime-green-piece-of-shit-using-a-brutally-vandalised-machine hit 99%.
Future uses
The politicians who implemented myki touted claims that:
- Users would be able to buy victuals at station-based cafés with their myki.
- Users could use their myki on associated systems both domestically and internationally.
- The myki card would double as a voting credential, a flux capacitor, and a sure-fire way to teach their children right from wrong.
All of these claims have proved to be as unfounded as the claim that homosexuals exist in Victoria. Nevertheless, myki cards may be used in the future to stablise wobbly tables, jimmy door locks, and scrape accumulated ice from car windscreens.
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