All very civilized
Another routine eye appointment today several towns away. I’ve been resistant to download an ‘app for everything’, but I have to admit I’m being won over.
The train app is awesome. Check the schedule, book the trip, pay for it automatically and your ticket is a QR code on your phone. Painless. Do it on the way to the station. We ought to do more of that for better reasons.
The bus has a similar app, though I don’t actually book the tickets with it. They have a map that shows you where your bus is right now.
Paying my credit card bill with my phone, ditto. Oh, by the way – I got a new debit card recently. It said the expiry date was 1/31.
I says to B, “That’s weird – it tells me the date but not the year.”
And he says, “’31 is the year.”
Yipe!
Posted: February 5th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: February 5, 2026, 7:59 pm
If only the government wasn’t tracking your every transaction…
Comment from blake
Time: February 5, 2026, 8:07 pm
Yes, I’ve already begun to start referring to them as the NINETEEN30s because it’s going to get confusing.
Comment from Bob Mulroy
Time: February 5, 2026, 9:52 pm
I’ve never had a credit card survive an entire year before it breaks, becomes unreadable, or gets sniped by those pesky kids in Asia.
I find their expiries rather hopeful.
Comment from Carl
Time: February 5, 2026, 9:53 pm
How many apps have you got on your phone? I’ve got a ridiculous number – 153. Far too many. Occasionally, I go through the list with a view to deleting some, but they are all useful (or potentially so). Some of them I have not used for more than a year, so I suppose I ought to uninstall those.
Comment from Carl
Time: February 5, 2026, 9:57 pm
I’ve looked at those apps for our local buses and trains. They are very impressive but I haven’t been on a train for 15 years. Like you, I get free bus travel but I don’t use those either.
Comment from Durneyankee
Time: February 6, 2026, 2:55 am
You must not have anything like Dallas Area Rapid Transit.
They should be sued for using the word Rapid. Son #2 thought he’d use it to get to college years ago.
It took 2.5 hours to go about 10 miles (that’s a little over 16 Kill-o-meters for you fuzzy Europeans…oh, well, actually pretty much for everybody but Americans…oh…)
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: February 6, 2026, 1:35 pm
I’ve got a few apps I use regularly (email, text, weather, calendar, maps, banking) but the app that gets the most use, and I mean several times as much time as all the others put together, is Amazon Kindle.
I don’t have a phone so much as I have a pocket library.
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