Golden Girls?

This past Friday, several friends and I went to New York City for the day.

Three of us drove together in one car to the Hamilton train station; the other two came separately from a different location.  My two friends and I bought our train tickets from the ticket booth outside, each requesting "one round-trip ticket to New York Penn Station."  We then checked our tickets - one was labeled NYP (New York Penn Station) and the other was labeled Hamilton. We kept in our hands the tickets labeled NYP and put the others away, along with our receipts showing a payment of $30.

A few minutes later, our other two friends showed up.  When they checked the tickets they had just purchased, one noticed that her pair of tickets indicated the same destination: both were labeled NYP.  The two decided to go back to the ticket booth to get the problem rectified before we all boarded the train.

Five minutes later they joined us once again but, this time, one of the women looked markedly different than she had when she left us, like she had just seen or experienced a catastrophic event.    

She broke the shocking news, as if headlining the story: "He gave me a senior discount!"   

  

She reported that when she approached the ticket guy about the problem, he told her very matter-of-factly that she had in fact been given the correct tickets. 

He explained that the "senior" discount automatically spits out the same ticket (or what looks the same), so as not to "confuse" the senior patron. Additionally, he pointed out to her - proudly, it seemed - that her senior package provided her with a savings of $17 for a total round-trip fare of $13. 

Keep in mind that she made it clear to us that the word "senior" never came up during the initial ticket purchase. This meant he made the judgment call that she was a senior all on his own.   

So on the one hand, my friend greatly appreciated the discount but, on the other hand, she was  MORTIFIED that he made that assessment after just glancing at her.

Discussion of the traumatic event led us to question at what age does NJ Transit consider a senior citizen to be?  Is it 60?  62?  65?  She was horrified to think the age could be 65.

Or maybe NJ transit's senior threshold is 50 years old, which would correspond with the age that AARP recruits its first-time members, in which case all of us could've/should've received the discount. She was OK with his thinking she was 50, while the rest of us were momentarily annoyed that we didn't get the discount if that was the magic number. 

And even though the remaining four of us were happy that this scenario didn't happen to us (despite the fact that she was $17 richer) on that particular morning, it was WAY too close for comfort. We also realized how vulnerable we all are.  Next time, it could be any one of us telling that same story.   

I wasn't sure if I'd rather have paid a "regular" fare for $30 or a "senior" fare for $13, without having broached the topic on my own.

I decided then - and still feel this way a few days later - that I'll take the senior fare when I tell the ticket booth guy I'm a senior, but not a day before.