Toll

Shortly after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003 I signed up for FasTrak. That's the electronic toll tag for the bridges around the Bay. With FasTrak in your car--it comes with a piece of Velcro to attach to your windshield--you never have to wait for the toll booths at the bridges and you even get discounted toll at times. I still don't understand why not every single driver has signed up, FasTrak is free, you just have to prepay a certain amount of toll ($25) and it replenishes from a bank account or credit card after you go below $15.
That's what just prompted me to write about it though. Apparently the credit card I enrolled expired, so now FasTrak is threatening with penalties if I don't update my information. For that, I needed to go online and remember a PIN code I gave four years ago, YIKES! But with the help of my paper archive and some old FasTrak mailings I found out what the standard PIN is. I won't tell you, but it is pretty obvious and one may even see it as a security breach. Standard PINs like that aren't a good idea. I am happy though that nobody knows my FasTrak account number, even though the PIN is pretty easy to guess :-)