Coming as I do from over a decade of printing/publications background, I prefer to take steps to ensure that my bus-pass is fairly well protected from the elements. I
know what water and other things can do to paper, and it's not pretty.
And at $133 (if I'm lucky) to replace that piece of paper... well, i'd just rather not have to deal with that.
So my solution is to laminate mine, and wear it on a lanyard. Here's what I do, step-by-step...
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| The bus-pass shows up in a generic envelope, with the pass and a receipt in it. |
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| The pass itself is printed on a pre-perforated card, with the rounded corners cut completely. It's pretty easily removed from the card, just needs some folding on the perforations back and forth to loosen it up. |
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| Freed of it's mailing-card... |
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| Office Max and Office Depot carry hot and cold luggage-tag laminating pouches. I generally prefer the cold ones, but this time they didn't have any and the hot-laminate pouches were $15 for 25. |
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| Slip it into a pouch... |
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| Run it through the laminator... |
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| Viola! The pass shifted a bit somewhere along the line (not sure why), but it's in it's own little world-proof bubble now... This'll survive water, being run over, run through a washing machine, etc., etc. |
The laminate pouches generally come with rubber-band-kinda-things (right above the pass itself in that last picture), so other attachment options are available...
Sadly that wouldn't work with the IndyGo passes unless they've changed since last time I rode the bus. For the IndyGo pass, you actually had to insert the cardboard into a reader where it'd swallow it and then spit it back out at you...the good thing tho was that I think the bus itself could print you a new one if you needed it.
ReplyDeleteThat's kinda cool, actually, Faeya. My biggest gripe with the bus-passes here is that they are so fragile (potentially) - all it'd take is one wayward coffee-spill and you're out $140 (for the express passes). But if the buses themselves were capable of re-issuing a pass, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned.
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