Philadelphia

In the middle of all of our day trips to NYC, we decided to fit in a day trip to Philadelphia.

Last year I did a day trip on my own, but all I did was go to Iron Sport Gym in Glenolden to meet Steve Pulcinella, lift some weights, and the eat my fill of food back at 30th Street Station before heading back to NYC, so I never got to see any sights or explore anything else Philly has to offer.

Because we didn't try to book them in advance, Amtrak tickets were ridiculously expensive for just a daytrip, so we decided to take the scenic, more adventurous route: local trains.

The first train was from Stamford, Connecticut to Grand Central Station. We then took the subway shuttle across to Times Square/42nd St.

Then the 1 train downtown to Penn Station/34th St where we bought New Jersey Transit tickets to 30th Street Station, Philadelphia.

The next train got us all the way to Trenton, New Jersey, where we had to quickly swap onto a SEPTA train to go all the way to 30th Street Station.

Five trains, one way. On the upside, it was about half the price of Amtrak tickets, and only an extra 30-60 minutes of travel. It was also more fun ;)

30th Street Station is beautiful, and probably my favorite train station of the ones I've visited. It has a similar style to Grand Central, only with a lot less people running through it.

So we quickly grabbed a map and started walking down Market St towards the downtown area.

From there we bought tickets to a hop on hop off bus tour and made our way through a lot of Philly's history; the museums, the Rocky steps, old town Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell.

If there's anything that surprised me, it was old town Philly. The old style buildings were a sight worth seeing, as was hearing the history behind some of the plaques and markings on the buildings. It's a very pretty area to explore. And Benjamin Franklin had his hand in a lot of its history.

Unfortunately all the pictures are on my camera and not my phone, so I can't upload any here at the moment.

And of course, we stopped to chow down on some awesome Philly cheesesteaks at Carmen's Famous Italian Hoagies and Cheesesteaks in Reading Terminal Market before heading home, catching a local train back to 30th Street Station, and five more to get back to Norwalk.

So eleven trains, a bus tour and some Philly cheesesteaks later and we had experienced beautiful Philadelphia in one very long day.

As tired as we were, we had an early start the next morning for our overnight trip to Portland, Maine.

New York

Cherie and I spent about 12 days at her brother and his wife's place in Norwalk, Connecticut, so any time we wanted to go to New York City, we had to jump on a Metro-North train to get into Grand Central Station.

Grand Central is beautiful and ridiculously chaotic with the hundreds of people who are moving through the main concourse at every time of the day.

I never really realised just how big Central Park was until we did a bus tour of uptown Manhattan. It's huge! A ridiculous 51 blocks long, and 3 blocks wide. The bus tour was two hours long and went from the south-west corner of the park all the way up to Harlem, across to the upper east side and back down to the hectic downtown area again.

It was actually really nice to just sit back for a couple of hours and enjoy the ride without trying to get from one place to another via the subway.

Oh and about the subway; if you're ever visiting NYC and need to get around, learn the subway. It's really not that hard with a map, even though it seems overwhelming at first. On our last holiday to the US, I let Cherie get us around on the subway. This time I actually took the time to figure it out for myself.

Times Square was amazing in the evening, as always. I got to see it last year, and I knew what it was like, but the pure magnitude of everything still surprised me.

We hit up a few bars, McSorley's Old Ale House probably being the highlight of the lot for me. In a nutshell, it's a very old Irish pub where you get two choices of beer; light or dark. And each round is two glasses of beer.

We ended up having about five rounds each, which sounds like a lot at two glasses a round, but the glasses are small.

The great part about the bar is you're seated wherever you fit, even if it's with complete strangers. We got to chat with a couple who were crawling a bunch of the oldest pubs in the city for the guy's birthday.

Food was always great, as it usually is in the US. The highlight was definitely Crif Dogs in NoHo. By far the best hot dogs I've had in the country. I had two chili dogs, and Cherie and James had the chihuahua, a bacon-wrapped dog topped off with avocado and sour cream.

At some point Cherie's friend, James, arrived to travel with us, so the last couple of day trips were with him aswell.

Those were the highlights of New York for me.

I've still gotta catch up on Philly and Portland, Maine. We're currently road-tripping through the south, heading to Mississippi tomorrow, so hopefully while on the road, I can catch up a bit!

San Francisco and Chicago

We're almost half way through our holiday in the US now and I figure it's time for a couple of posts. I'm typing this all on my phone so there's bound to be a few mistakes.

First off; San Francisco.

We spent a few days in San Francisco and it was amazing. Our first meal at Lou's Fish Shack was crab and fish tacos with black beans with some local beers to wash it all down. The taste of it all, even with the jet lag barrelling down hard, was amazing for a first meal after nearly 24 hours of mind-numbing travel.

The Golden Gate Bridge was breath-taking. I know thousands of people drive over it everyday and probably think it's just a hunk of metal, but I was blown away by the magnitude of it. The lingering fog added to its appeal, just barely covering the tops of the bridge.

We also did the typical touristy shit, like walking around Pier 39, a hop on hop off bus tour and we spent almost every night battling jet lag. I also managed to get a cold, which made sleeping just a little bit harder.

Chicago was as beautiful as I remember from our last visit.

As a result of slight time zone differences and bad traffic, we only ended up with two nights and one full day in Chicago, so we didn't get to do all we had hoped to do, but still ended up having a great time.

Our first meal was a cajun feast at Heaven on Seven for a late dinner. We filled our bellies with crab cakes, gumbo, BBQ and pecan pie and chased it with more beer. Cherie had finally found her favorite American beer, Abita Purple Haze.

The next day, we walked around North Michigan Ave, shopping and eating.

That night, I was lucky enough to meet up with my brother, Aaron, who has been travelling around the US since early June, and Erik, our life-long friend who currently lives in Boston. We went on a bit of a pub crawl in the uptown area with a couple of Erik's friends. At some point we stopped into Portillo's Hot Dogs for some food.

In the meantime, Cherie caught up with her friend Megan, who is travelling around the americas with her boyfriend, Scott, for a few drinks of their own.

By the end of the night, we had all caught up at the Kerryman Hotel for yet more beers.

The next morning Cherie and I hopped on another flight, very hung over, bound for her brother's home in Norwalk, Connecticut.

"Go to" Workouts

This was originally posted on my tumblr, but I decided to put it here.

I was chatting to a guy at the gym the other day about what our “go to" workouts are for those days where you walk in with no plan other than “I’m benching today", or when you don’t have enough time to do what you had originally planned, but still want to get something done that could be considered good training.

These are a few of mine.

Max Out, Back Off

This is my usual “go to" for benching and overhead pressing and is something I took from the Iron Sport Strength Method; max out, and then drop the weight to 80% and do three AMRAP sets.

The only “twist" I put on this is that on the last AMRAP set, I must hit more reps than on the second AMRAP set. I’m usually a bit lazy on the second set, so this is my punishment.

Maxing out can be for a 1RM, 3RM or 5RM.

Assistance work is always pretty standard; lots of DB rows and maybe some direct triceps and biceps work if there’s time.

5x5

I started lifting on a 5x5 program, and probably stopped using it sooner than I should have. None the less, occasionally I’ll look at what I’ve done around the 6-8RM mark and have at it.

Leaves me good and sore for a couple of days.

Front Squats and Deadlifts

I like this combo a lot. The front squats aren’t hard to recover from, and doing them first seems to prime me for deadlifts.

There isn’t much to it; I usually do the front squats for triples, and the deadlifts for sets of 3-5.

If I do anything else after this, it’s usually kettlebell swings until I’m nearly dead.

And that’s all I can think of off the top of my head at the moment!

Sandwiches; The Ultimate Manly Food

There's something special about meat and vegetables and cheese wrapped in some kind of bread. I think it's because you hold in you bare hands while you tear it apart with your mouth. By that logic, I guess ribs and wings fall into that camp too. It's just downright manly.

A few years ago, when I first started lifting weights, I used to train on Sunday mornings with a couple of mates for anywhere from from 2-4 hours, doing everything from lifting weights to sprinting and all kinds of cross-training at a nearby school.

And every Sunday afternoon, while totally exhausted and dying from hunger, I would fill one piece of lebanese flat bread with anything I could find in the fridge; ham, chicken, avocado, tomato, lettuce, greek yogurt, olives, cheese... anything! And I would eat it, right there in the kitchen. I wouldn't even go and sit down. I still don't.

Sometimes, we'd all eat together and buy a vienna loaf and fill it with bacon and eggs while we chatted about how painful our legs felt after doing walking lunges up and down a basketball court for half an hour.

It was a favorite post-workout meal in the beginning, and it's a favorite meal today. After strongman events training, there's not much more satisfying than a burger with a couple of beef patties, bacon, cheese and ton of lettuce stuffed into it.

That's about all I have to say. On Saturday morning I fly over to the US, the land of sandwiches, for a holiday with my girlfriend, and I've been hanging around in /r/eatsandwiches a little too much lately, so I have sandwiches on my mind.

Everyday Carry; A New Hobby

A few years ago I stumbled across a reddit thread in which a bunch of users detailed what they would do in the case of a zombie apocalypse. It was fascinating. Some of the detail that users went to was astonishing, and it got me thinking about how unprepared I was for any kind of disaster situation. Not that we experience a lot of natural disasters in Melbourne, let alone zombie apocalypses, but it's always good to be prepared for anything.

So, as you do when you read stuff about the impending zombie apocalypse, I went a bought a bunch of stuff; a big backpack (too big, of course), multi-tool, first-aid kit, various tools and containers etc... I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube about survival tips and techniques ("I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder School, and I thank you for your support") and read more and more stuff about bug-out bags and preparedness for various situations.

Eventually I came across the everyday carry (EDC) community. The basic premise behind EDC items are things you carry with you everyday (maybe for a particular period of time) in an effort to be prepared for particular situations; camping, hiking, work, school, holidays, etc...

Of course, I already had my own EDC, although without purposely having it; phone, keys, wallet, phone charger, bottle opener, water bottle, pen, USB drive, etc... all in my pockets or backpack, which I take with me almost everywhere.

Putting the usefulness of these tools aside, there was also a kind of aesthetic beauty attached to it, whether the owner was going for a tactical look, a smart and classy look or a vintage look.

So how bad is this new obsession? Let's just say it could be worse. A lot worse.

Since February I have bought four flashlights; a Fenix E05, a Petzl Tikka 2, a Fenix LD12 and a Klarus Mi X6. Who the hell needs to buy four flashlights in the space of 5 months? And there are two more flashlights that I'm eyeing off too; the CountyComm AAA copper flashlight and a Foursevens Mini ML. I guess I'll have to wait until later in the year, or even next year, for those. A titanium flashlight would be nice aswell...

I'm just glad Australia has some laws that make it tough for me to carry knives around for no reason, otherwise there would've been a few purchases from Spyderco too.

Multi-tools. I don't even know where to start with these. I'd love to buy a Leatherman Skeletool CX, or a regular Skeletool with a non-serrated knife if it still existed, to keep in my backpack, but they're stupidly expensive in Australia! I guess I'll stick with my Leatherman Fuse and Victorinox Spartan for now. I'm carrying a Pry Bar from Tofty on my keychain at the moment, but I'd love an Atwood tool, like a Weevil, except it's stupidly hard to get these from Peter Atwood's site, due to the timezone difference and how fast his batches sell out, and they are marked up a lot if you want to buy them from a third party.

And bags. At least I can justify buying bags because I carry one every day. That's a good enough reason, right? If I get the 5.11 MOAB 10, I can carry it to work every day, and also take it overseas as carry-on luggage, since it easily fits the size limitations. That's pretty doable for $100 AUD. Or I could get a GoRuck GR1, for nearly $300... Or maybe I should just settle on a REI Flash 18 for a much lower price tag.

Or maybe I should just get out now, before all of my money disappears...

Melbourne's Strongest Man 2013

Yesterday I competed in my first strongman competition at Definition 352 in Doncaster, Melbourne. It was a long day, with about 20 athletes competing across 4 men's divisions and 2 women's divisions.

I was one of 4 heavyweights.

Sled drag. Drag 100kg for 10m on a flat, deload 25kg, drag 15m up an incline, deload 25kg, drag 15m up an incline. I was a little worried about this one. When I trained for it, we dragged the 100kg up an incline aswell, and it was slooooow to move for all of us. Since they changed it to be flat for the heaviest weight, it made it a lot easier. Came 3rd.

Deadlifts. 75 seconds for biggest total tonnage. 3 regular bars loaded with 175kg, 200kg and 225kg. All the heavyweights opted to just rep out the lightest bar. These were supposed to be dead-stop deadlifts, but ended up being touch-n-go, which I'm not used to at all. I still managed 15 reps with the 175kg bar to take 3rd place.

2" Axle Clean and Press. 75 seconds AMRAP with 90kg, each rep cleaned. This was the event I felt the most prepared for, since I was doing reps on the axle every week, sometimes twice a week. In training, I managed 8 reps when I was fresh, and 6 reps when I was slightly fatigued, so I wanted 6 reps for this, and if I'd gotten it, I would've taken 2nd in the event. But the bar was a lot more slippery from all of the previous competitors, and lost concentration and dropped my last clean and ended up with 5 reps for equal 2nd place.

Medley. Prowler +100kg for 20m, 60kg keg carry for 20m, 200kg tire flip for 10m. The prowler was super fast, the keg carry wasn't too bad either, but man did my tire flips suck. I missed the first flip due to nerves, and had shit drops on 3 or 4 of my subsequent flips. Although I got a little practice with the tires, it wasn't enough and it cost me. Came 4th in this event.

Atlas stones. 75kg, 80kg, 101kg, 120kg, 130kg over a 1.2m bar in 75 seconds. I had done a bit of practice with these in the lead up, and a couple of weeks ago managed to get the 120kg stone over a 1m high bar without tacky, but man it gassed me. However this time I had tacky, which was my first time using it. My goal for this was to get the 120kg stone over the bar, and at least lap the 130kg stone. Well I got the 120kg stone over in epic, grindy fashion, but could only break the 130kg stone off the floor by mere centimetres. Came 3rd in this due to slower time.

Overall I came 3rd out of 4 heavyweights. I was the shortest and lightest heavyweight there, and the only one in his first competition, so I'm super happy with how I did, and I'm incredibly happy with how the competition was run. George Mariolis and the Definition 352 crew did a great job running, judging and scoring the competition and I'm proud to be associated with them!

A big thank you to my lovely girlfriend, Cherie, for supporting me for the past couple of months while I trained and ate as well as I could. Thanks to Definition 352 for putting on a good show, and thanks to my friends and family who showed up to support me!

I can't wait to do more competitions in the near future!

I'll upload some videos somewhere once I get them all together. They're all spanned across a couple of friends' phones.

Things Australia should steal from the US

Last year, Cherie and I went on a holiday to the US for nearly five weeks. I attempted to write a blog post detailing the entire trip, but once I got done writing up the first week, it was really long and I couldn't decide what to take out of it and I really couldn't be bothered proof-reading it again or writing equally long posts about the remaining four weeks, so I decided to scrap the idea, and instead opt for some shorter blog posts about the trip. This is one such post.

In those five weeks, we came across a lot of things I wish we had back here in Australia, or at least in Melbourne, in case other cities are smarter than mine.

Pedestrian Countdown Timers

We did a lot of walking and, despite initially being skeptical as to how useful it was going to be, it ended up being really handy. They need to make noise though; I don't remember exactly how many times it happened, but on more than one occasion, while out on my own, I almost missed the lights because I was looking in another direction.

Truck Stop Food

Breakfast burritos? 99 cent tacos? A seemingly endless selection of beef jerky? Drinks that are bigger than the size of my head? On our bus trip in the first week, there was nothing better than hitting the highway in the early morning with a cheap breakfast in-hand and a stash of meaty snacks to chew on.

Mexican Food Everywhere

The thing I liked about going into almost any restaurant was that there was always tacos on the menu. Sort of like the equivalent of our chicken parma. Except, you know, better.

Slow Cooked Meats, Better Sandwiches and Burgers, Sweet Potato Fries and Chicken Wings with Blue Cheese Sauce

Big Boy BBQ, in Caulfield, is the only decent place for slow cooked American-style meat in Melbourne, and it's awesome! We need more places like that. More Australians need to be into slow cooked meats. Slow cooked meats are better than a sausage in bread, and pulled pork tastes better in burgers than self-oiling rissoles from Woolies.

Speaking of which, the sandwiches and burgers here suck. The US loves their burgers. Whether it was in a restaurant in Chicago, a liquor store in Washington DC or an outlet mall in Nevada, the sandwiches and burgers were better than almost anything I've had here.

And they often came with sweet potato fries! We first had this (above) at Smashburger in St. George, Utah. Sweet potato fries are a golden idea and taste soooo much better than regular fries.

Now, ok. Sure. We have chicken wings here. But it's not the same. They're not cooked the same. They're not spiced the same (but we'll still call them Buffalo wings, anyway). And the blue cheese sauce is NOT blue cheese sauce.

Interstate Rail

On the east coast, we rode a lot of trains, with Amtrak, between New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and Norwalk, and the longest train ride we had was 4 hours from Norwalk to DC. If I want to take the train to Adelaide, I'll be in transit for at least 10 hours, including lay-overs of anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and will pay a lot of money to do it, while it takes about 8 hours to just drive there, or 1 hour to fly there for about half the price.

Our interstate train system is craptastic!

Although, I've since heard that catching trains on the west coast is a very different experience.

That's about it! We're going back to the US later this year again, so I'll probably update this in a few months.

Move Around Vim Windows Less Annoyingly

On any given project at work, I will always end up opening 3-4 windows (and even more recently, the NERD Tree sidebar, which is a plugin I recommend everyone get) and I get sick of having to press Ctrl+W and then h, j, k or l to move to the next window. It's one of my most used key combinations and it needed to be shortened.

I wanted to just type Ctrl+[hjkl]. So I added this to my .vimrc:

nnoremap <C-h> <C-w>h
nnoremap <C-j> <C-w>j
nnoremap <C-k> <C-w>k
nnoremap <C-l> <C-w>l

And that's it. Easier window navigation with a quick vimrc addition!

Tough Mudder, Melbourne 2013

On Saturday, I ran my second Tough Mudder down at Phillip Island. This time was a much different experience than the first time, given that I was a lot more prepared and injury-free!

I teamed up with Andrew again. And because Gordon is currently working in Indonesia doing some good deeds, he couldn't make it. But Andrew's wife, Jen, signed up, having watched us the first time, exclaiming "I reckon I can do that!"

Preparation

I don't wanna get into the boring details of it, but basically:

• From September onwards, I walked up to 6km a day in my commute to/from work.
• In the preceding weeks, I went on a very strict ketogenic diet. This was a last minute, all-out effort to cut a bit more weight. It worked.
• In the preceding weeks, I also upped my running/jogging/sprinting and did kettlebell workouts 3-4 times a week. Mostly clean+press ladders, but I threw in some swings+push up gassers occasionally.
• In the week before, I did a lot more foam rolling and mobility work than usual.
• The day before, I loaded up on carbs and drank a lot of 50/50 water/gatorade mix.
• In the morning of the event, I mixed a teaspoon of this magnesium powder stuff I decided to try with some water, and had that along with some eggs, a banana and some more water/gatorade.

The Event

The ice bath (arctic enema) still sucks. It sucked last year and it sucked this year. But luckily it was the first obstacle. Why does it suck? All of my muscles tightened up. My chest tightened up, which sucks as an asthmatic. And I felt ridiculous trying to get my legs out of the bath, which was just around chest height, because everything was so tight and it was hard to move.

The mud mile was a lot more fun this year; instead of cramming a few hundred people into waist-deep mud, single file, they had a much wider area to move, and about half of it was piles of mud that we had to "climb" over before falling into another mud bath. Team work was pretty important here, as was helping out anyone around you. Probably my favorite obstacle of the day!

Along the way, I was reminded that running in paddocks makes you fear for your ankles and knees. I was so sure I was going to roll an ankle. I certainly saw plenty of people who did.

After about 12km - a lot further than I expected - the cramps started to kick in. There's nothing more annoying than attempting to run while your adductors are cramping. The way you end up compensating for it makes you look like a zombie from a B-grade horror movie desperately chasing after fresh brains.

And after about 15km, I hit the proverbial wall. Stints of jogging didn't last long, and when I did get a decent burst of energy that inspired me jog for longer than 30 seconds, the cramps decided to kick in again. Lots of walking happened from there on out.

Diving from a platform into muddy water - which, by the way, makes it impossible to see anything, like, you know, how far away the surface is - is an odd experience. It's not a high enough platform to really be dangerous, but it's high enough that, in mid-air, you have enough time to think "oh shit, I'm still falling!"

On the second-last obstacle, Everest - that quarter-pipe that's prevalent in every Tough Mudder video on YouTube - I injured myself. Upon getting to the top, on my 3rd attempt, I grabbed the arms of two guys who were helping me up, and I guess the guy who grabbed my left arm pulled a little too hard; I felt my shoulder come out! I had to keep yelling "let my arm go, my shoulder's fucked!". And when he did, it must've gone back in, because I could move it in a full range of motion again, but it felt baaad! But it's all good! I went to the physio yesterday and there's no major damage. I just have to go easy on it for a couple of weeks.

Luckily the last event didn't really need my shoulders to be healthy; electroshock therapy!

Last year, the shocks were mostly tame, but you could feel them. This year, it was a whole other story. That shit hurt! I got zapped a good 9-10 times and by the laughs it was giving Cherie and her friend, James, it must've looked great. I guess it's true; there's nothing funnier than watching big, tough men cower and scream like children after a few zaps!

The End

Jen and Andy finished strongly and without injury! They, and Brendan, a guy we befriended at the start and ran the whole course with, were a lot of fun to do it with!

It was a great day and I was happy with how much better my running capacity, and performance on the obstacles, has gotten since my first Mudder!

I've been telling myself that this was the last Tough Mudder I'd do, but... it really was a lot of fun. We'll see if I sign up for the September run...

Lifting Heavy One Day a Week

Since moving out with Cherie and not having a car to drive to a gym, I haven't been able to lift weights much at all.

Every night, when I get home from work, there's a lot of housework that needs to get done; dishes need to be put away, laundry needs to get done, dinner needs cooking and eating, more dishes need washing, lunch the next day needs preparing.

There had to be a way to satiate my hunger to lift. It was eating me up. I was getting antsy about it; daydreaming about what lifts I would do the next time I could get a barbell in my hand. I was also feeling really lazy and getting a bit fatter, since I was still eating similar amounts of food. Spending an hour in the garage maxing my DB clean and press and then doing a bunch of DB rows, or some kettlebell work just wasn't hitting the right spot. And then I re-read this Dan John article.

From the article, I formulated a plan to use Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday as days to do something.

Saturday I lift weights, for 2-3 hours, or as long as I can before I'm sapped for energy. It's a basic squat/push/pull routine. Everything is heavy. Favorite exercises include front squats, strict presses, push presses, BTN push presses, barbell rows, regular deadlifts and snatch-grip deadlifts. I use Dan John's "rule of 10", and after 4-5 weeks, I've set a number of PRs on my front squat, push press and BTN push press.

Since I'm already playing basketball on Sunday nights, I've decided that day is sorted for now.

Wednesday is kettlebell night. No more than half an hour. I do clean and press ladders with my 20kg bell. Five ladders, working up to five rungs per ladder. Very short rests. If I feel like I still have some energy, I finish with sets of swings, with a few push-ups in between sets. That reminds me, I really need a heavier bell...

All other days are spent doing a little mobility work with my foam roller, and preparing food for the next day or two.

The bare minimum to keep me happy and still get a little stronger along the way!

My Run-in with Myki

Myki sucks. I had never had any issues using MetCards for ten years. So, despite having a good run with Myki for a few months without any issues, I was finally subjected to the clusterfuck that is Myki's complaint system.

I top up my Myki card with Myki Pass instead of Myki Money. I do this because it's a lot cheaper for me. So there I was, attempting to top up my Myki Pass with 170-something dollars for 4 weeks, with cash, when the machine stopped accepting my notes and took my $75, leaving me with a complaint receipt to take to Myki staff.

So I did that.

Since I was trying to top up at Southern Cross Station and there is a Myki office thing right there, I walked over and handed the receipt to them. The guy was very kind and helpful. Everything after that kinda sucked.

The short of it was, customer care asked for a bunch of details, told me to write down a case number, told me I had to keep the complaint receipt, left me without any way to get home (so I bought a trusty MetCard) and told me they'd get back to me in a couple of days.

A couple of days later I get a phone call.

They asked me for the same details I had given them when I lost my money and and they wanted a copy of the complaint receipt. I offered to read out the numbers on the receipt (as the guy at Southern Cross Station had done), but the woman said they had to see the original. WTF? I asked if a picture would suffice, because fuck having to send it to them in the mail and wait yet another couple of days. She said a picture would be ok, so I sent it immediately.

She called back a day later. I was then told that they would reimburse the money I lost (within the next 24 hours), but that they would put it on my card as Myki Money. But I didn't want Myki Money! I was trying to buy a Myki Pass because it works out cheaper for me in the long run!

Whatever. I just decided I was happy that I at least got something back.

Why do I have to keep the complaint receipt? After the guy who helped me at Southern Cross Station read out the numbers over the phone, why not just put those numbers into the case (or issue or ticket or whatever their system refers to it as)?

After they called me, part of verifying who I was was me telling them my phone number. They just called me! This is pointless and weak security.

I can't help but feel that 3-4 days is a long time to reimburse someone for money lost because their machine decided to not do its job.