Man, Presto is really starting to get on my nerves...
So yesterday at around 8am I loaded $30 on to my card. I had enough on my card to cover my day's travels so I had little concern. Now despite advising 24 hours to load, in my previous experience it cones up almost instantly.
Yet on my trip to and from work 8 hours later it was not coming through. I got off the bus near a GO station and used a balance checker, and it still did not show. I also did not get an email to confirm my purchase, no charge was on my credit card, and the website was not showing my updated balance (it showed my current balance at $10, yet under transaction history showed it going down to $7).
I called them up and had them check to see if I had my load waiting, and apparently it was. We assumed that since it was under 24 hours, it had not been processed yet was all.
This morning at about 10:30am, 26.5 hours after loading, I got to the Viva stop and did a balance check, and surprise... it still wasn't showing up. Since I'm trying to stay on the right side of everything, I tapped and let it go into a negative balance. So now despite doing everything right on my end, I will have to pay a penalty to unlock my card.
Here are some deeper questions though: who gets the money from this penalty, and where does it go to? How much money has been collected from this fee? What incentives and oversight does this party have to ensure the system works as advertised, rather than charging people penalties fraudulently? And seeing that the system is so prone to errors, how come there is no appeal process to refund the penalty fee if the user was correct and it was the system which failed?