Where did that printout go?

The instructions are pretty clear : "You will need to bring a copy of the printout with you to board the bus", but no one follows them :)

I often take the bus to Boston (and back) on the weekends, and generally follow instructions and take a printout of the ticket with me. Today (like me) the printer at home wasn't feeling a 100% so I decided a copy of the email on my Android phone would have to do. I'd seen a couple of people do this before, so I wasn't particularly concerned it would freak the ticketing agent out.

However, when I got there it looked like paper was the exception not the rule. I was 7th in line. and 3 iPhones, 3 Blackberrys and 1 Android phone later, the ticketing agent hadn't seen a piece of paper yet. He even seemed fairly nonchalant about moving my ticket on the screen window to make sure the date was right. On another note, there seem to a be surprising number of really young people that carry Blackberrys!

There's no reason this shouldn't be even more common. Scanning a bar-code of a phone screen should work just as well as of paper. This could, should (maybe even already is?) easily be extended to movie tickets, airline boarding passes, concerts etc. As a society, we've still not made the "paper-less office" a reality, but the time of paper-less ticketing does seems really close by.