I had to park in Hove on Friday, finding a space was easy enough, but paying for such parking brought a whole new level of moronic bureaucracy. I rang the number of the sign next to where we parked, which is where it all started to go wrong.
In a former life I must have rung the number before as I was in their system. As when I put the location code in the automated service told me I was parking our old car. So, I pressed the option to change the car registration. But this led to them sending me a text with a code to type in to verify it was me, but obviously it wouldn’t allow me to cut and paste it. So, juggling between apps I managed to enter it.
Then they asked me to speak the registration, and so I very carefully enunciated G-U-1-9-K-P-P, and after twenty seconds it read it back to me as E-U-1-5-K-T-G. So, I moved to keypad entry of the registration number. I hit 4 to enter G, only to not get G as an option, only 1 for H, 2 for I and for 4. So, I retried, and it gave me the option for G the second time. It took some time to enter all seven digits and then press # to say it was complete.
On to the next level. I had used a card to pay at some point in the past, but it had expired, so I had to enter new card details. Which I did. Only to find that there was then no option to select how long I wanted to park for. It kept telling me to press * to go back to the previous menu. Which I did, several times to only get the same menu, and then it cut me off.
I rang back, only for the automated system to tell me it wanted to use the old registration number which I had changed on the first call. I hung up and stomped off to find a physical ticket machine.
When I did, I tapped start, put my registration number in and pressed the + sign to add time, only for the machine to reset. On to attempt two; start, add reg, hit plus twice and OK, and I got the prompt to tap my card on the reader. I did, and it said payment was successful and it was printing the ticket. The machine asked if I wanted a receipt. I hit yes and said it would print that as well. Only for the machine not to print either ticket or receipt and return to standby mode.
At this point I looked for something heavy to give the machine a damn good thrashing, Basil Fawlty style, as he had used a branch on his car in an episode of Fawlty Towers. But there was nothing around, so I stomped to the pub, 15 minutes after parking, swearing loudly as I did so, scaring the local residents.