I reckon I was onto more than I knew in coining the language of gnosticism in recent reflections on my personal Myki saga. Indeed I've now attained a still higher knowledge of Mykinian mysteries, surely a path to enlightenment, hitherto hidden from mortal perception. I had a sense that there might be some incantation yet to be revealed in the current quest for the holy grail of Myki functionality. If still I haven’t found it, I've certainly now been inducted into something awfully close. My last report from the trenches concluded with the promise of a callback on my auto top-up query, which has at last been accorded the status of a case number. The plot had thickened exponentially, with the promise of still more. The callback came just a short time ago, and I was certainly not disappointed gnostically speaking. It has been revealed to me that two auto top-ups, one on a date in February 2010, the other sometime since, mysteriously failed to reach the card, even after multiple touch-ons. You know you're into serious gnosis when even the higher inductees are truly mystified by a new discovery, as was the case for the guru who contacted me today. However he did lead me to a plane of enlightenment that makes a mere touch-on look positively neophyte. 

Before you read another word … I strongly recommend the removal of your shoes and a sniff of your armpits. You wouldn’t want to take this level of revelation lightly. To continue … I must now take my wife’s Myki card back to the station. This time it’s to be touched-on not to the big blue money-eating mother ship, but rather the apparently pedestrian reader up on the platform. I'm to perform a kind of purification ritual (so it sounds, at least) known as a “change of mind”. You touch on — wait 30 seconds — then touch off. Sounds so simple, but we gnostics know of course that the purest revelations are always outwardly the most humble. The “change of mind” will, so I'm assured, have a disproportionately profound effect on my Myki account. It will apparently dislodge both the formerly lost transactions and the latter auto top-up cancellation from their ethereal prisons, thus restoring them to the card for which they were destined, all without befouling the total cash balance. 

One further, more cosmic thought on the Myki story of us all. Myki could be conceived of as Victoria’s Tower of Babel – similar to, say, CityLink’s Burnley Tunnel. The former state government early in their reign announced a vision of Victoria becoming the techno capital of the Universe. Our state would host the premier tertiary courses in the bold frontiers of IT, such as computer game design inter alia. If it was top of the pops technologically, it would hail from our state. Once one has decided to be the hottest and biggest, there’s a sense of moral self-actualisation that compels one to go it alone as the new frontier pioneer par excellence. So then, we wanted a smartcard approach to transport ticketing (because being techno HQ demands smart everything). We could have bought a system that already works from London or Hong Kong. But we had to do it ourselves from scratch, to prove our world superiority. That’s what the world thought before Abraham wore short pants. It didn’t play out well then. Nothing’s changed. But who ever cared? Anyway, I guess I'd better be off to test my new knowledge. But to play it safe, I'll have a shower first.