Next time your Geek friend enthuses over his system just tell them “Yeah but it cant do jack shit without you.” I came home last night and the wife said “You’re going to explode in a minute.” she was right, ParkingEye had sent us a parking ticket for, wait for it, £50.00! Oh and it goes up to £110.00 if you don’t pay within 13 days! Nice business if you can get it.
We have a new system in the city centre car park, oh it’s a lot simpler than that silly idea of ‘pay and display’ none of this put your money in get your ticket shove it on the dashboard, oh no, now you must enter your vehicle registration first on a tiny keyboard while a queue waits behind you then lift the little plastic guard and feed your cash in making sure you have the correct money as, sorry it doesn’t give change. 
So last week I called into town to meet my daughter I’m a good boy and always get a ticket, now most people would throw it away once they have left the car park and I usually do however (Fortunately) when I ran out to the car in the pitch dark last night in the door pocket was two tickets and even more pleasing there was one for the 28th Nov. Straight away I could see what had happened I had typed the last three digits in the wrong way round!
Now if a human looked at this stuff they would have gone “Doh! I see what that moron did” and before some smart arse says “But hey that wasn’t your registration was it? ParkingEye check with DVLA and get ALL your cars details before sending the fixed penalty so if the camera says it’s a Citroen and the ticket says it’s a Fiesta then there is something wrong in’t there?
“Why are you moaning?” I’ll tell you why, because it’s a PITA and will be a PITA to sort out. I emailed them last night with a scanned copy of my evidence, their phone system is like Ebay designed to stop you speaking to anyone. I’ve learnt with these automated systems to pretend you don’t have a touch phone, after waiting about three (Which is a long time I hasten to add!) minutes it finally said “I will put you through to an operative.” finally a young woman came on the line who clearly spends her days fending off irate parkers.
PITA_1 After five minutes of explaining what had happened she said “I will have to speak with your wife.” but I was the driver? “We will need your wife’s permisson to speak with you.” so I’m wasting my time then? “we will need to speak with your wife however if you emailed in you should hear within a couple of weeks.”
PITA_2 So I have to wait a couple of weeks to find out if they accept my evidence which I suspect if they don’t means they will try and claim £110 instead of £50?
PITA_3 My wife works nights ParkingEye are only open 9am-5.15pm Mon-Fri so that mean the wife has to go without sleep to speak to them.
PITA_4 The wife will have to ring them from home and give her permission for them to talk to me then ring me at work and tell me she’s done it then I will have to ring them.
And people wonder why everyone has a short fuse these days.
