Clipper is a terrible service but not for the reasons outlined in this post. This post misses the point that tagging on and tagging off is a simple and relative

Clipper is a terrible service but not for the reasons outlined in this post. This post misses the point that tagging on and tagging off is a simple and relatively elegant solution to the problem posed by Caltrain charging by distance traveled. But that's not the real problem with Clipper. The real problem with clipper is their horrible customer service. Here's my story with clipper - and I hardly think I'm alone. I got my card about a year ago when I was going from San Jose to Redwood City once a week. On their web page I set up an 8-travel auto-pay system where I get 8 San Jose<->Redwood City tickets, and when I run out it buys a new set of 8 automatically. This works great until one day I missed my stop and wound up in Gilroy (woops). What SHOULD have happened is that I tag off, pay full price for the ticket I actually traveled, and have the 8 ride ticket refunded. If the card 'balance' (non-ticket cash on the card) goes below $0 (or, for them, $1.25 for reasons I don't understand) then it debits my account for the remaining balance. Instead what happened was my card went 'negative', and they shut down the card until I went to a Walgreens (?!) to pay the remainder of the balance. I was cautioned that paying online could take 1 to 2 weeks to clear the card. Where in the heck did Walgreens come in to the picture? By the way, despite having a banner outside advertising Clipper cards, my Walgreens had no idea what I was talking about. They had to call the GM to call the Clipper people to figure out what was going on. Fast forward, and now I'm commuting between Millbrae and San Francisco via Caltrain again. I just started at this company and they pay for Caltrain, so I link my Employee benefits clipper system to my clipper card - a process they made surprisingly simple which unsurprisingly completely F'ed up everything. All of a sudden I can no longer add funds via my regular portal and have to go through the company portal - and get this, though I bought my employee-benefit-purchased monthly pass on Sept 4th, that was too late for September. So I had to go to - you guessed it - Walgreens to buy a monthly pass with cash for the card that could no longer be used online. I'm hoping that it will work again in October... we will see.