Our Mechanically Deficient Age

From the Washington Post:

Here is Adam McGavock, Metro’s sales director, describing what happens when a subway rider sticks a paper Farecard in any of the rail system’s 1,000 or so mezzanine gates.

“What pulls your card in is a big rubber belt about that long,” he says, spreading his arms as far as they’ll go. “It’s motorized and running on a bunch of pulleys, and the pulleys have to be lubricated. The belt has to be tensioned and adjusted. It has to have powder put on it to maintain the exact right stickiness and durometer, okay?”

He takes a breath. “So the belt grabs your card and drags it across the mag-stripe reader. If you opened up the gate, we’d recognize the magnetic D-pad reader, like you see on an old reel-to-reel tape deck. Those have to be cleaned with rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip.”

He says: “Then there’s a rubber stamp that has to go into ink and stamp the value on your card — boom, like that — before it pops back out. I mean, really, it’s a miracle of engineering. When you look at how this thing works, that it actually functions as well as it does, it’s a brilliantly made machine. For 1968.”

Time now to say goodbye to the past. Thirty-eight years after the opening of Washington’s underground transit network, which has become the second-busiest subway in America, the demise of the paper Farecard is finally at hand.

Mr. McGavock here is beyond healthy admiration for the ingenuity of our predecessors and entering the realm of confused amazement that there was a secret long-ago age with sorcerors who could send rockets to the moon and even build engines that stamped farecards.