Last week, one of the pedals in my bike broke severily after some weeks of problems. One day, it suddenly fell off the crank, nearly making me fly in the middle of Blasco Ibáñez, a big avenue with dense traffic. Anyway, since Friday I can't cycle until I find a replacement pedal and crank for my old bicycle, so I had to go back to the annoying Metro.

On Monday, I used the magic card as usual, and so I did on Tuesday. When I left office and headed back home, something terrible happened, though. I went down to the Metro station, and introduced the Blue Gold. Instead of the usual processing sound, I was greeted with a loud beep, and my card went out through the "rejected" hole. The display read very clearly:

BILLETE AGOTADO

Surprised, I tried again. Oh no! I heard the train coming, so I used the emergency ticket and went in. A feeling similar to despair mixed with fear started to form in my chest while I ran down the stairway. During the travel, I thought this was just temporary, and other cancelling doors would accept the Blue Gold as usual.

When I got to the Aragón station, I tried going out with the magic card, with the same sad result. Defeated!

As I suspected, the card wasn't infinite at all, it just had an awesome number of rides on it (I think, in the end it must have been something like 270 or so), and I ran out on Tuesday, after 13 months of use.

On Wednesday, with my bicycle still broken, I had to go to the Metro again, and instead of just going through the gates, I had to go the vending machine to get one of those normal, ridiculous 10 ride ticket for 5.40€. Today, I've already used half of it, and the value of the Blue Gold is showing very clearly.

Ah well, I guess a lottery like that could not last forever...