Showerthought: my box of 14,000 old bus transfers finally hit 1 million total scans and I sat on the floor

Jade Allen · 2026-10-03T18:00:03.767692+00:00

I catalog old transit paper for a small archive in Fort Worth and the job sounds like watching paint dry. Each ticket gets a scan, a date note, and a route number typed in, and I do maybe 40 in a slow afternoon. A few days ago I checked my running count and it read 1,000,212 tickets scanned going back to when I started in 2019. The number itself is just a counter, but it made me picture every rider who ever held one of these little slips, the guy running for the 4:15, the kid using a transfer to get home from a summer job. I sat on the office floor for ten minutes just looking at the screen. The wild part is nobody outside this tiny hobby would ever care about a million bus stubs, but the route maps I can rebuild from them are weirdly detailed. Now I'm wondering if I should log them by handwriting style too. Anybody else here keep a running count on their odd collection and did a round number ever mess with your head?

🐿️Pinecone Attack

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Showerthought: my box of 14,000 old bus transfers finally hit 1 million total scans and I sat on the floor | Boring But Cool Jobs - Pinecone Attack