Somebody Call the Geek Squad

 

I miss the good old days of parking in Chicago. I used to park just about anywhere I wanted to. Bus stops, corners, loading zones, and as long as I left a few feet for the firemen, I'd park near a fire hydrant. Parking tickets meant very little. I'm talking about forty plus years ago. The city was in such disarray that you had little chance of a parking ticket being enforced, if you got one at all.

About twelve years ago, in his final screw you to Chicago tax payers, Mayor Richie Daley leased the parking meters to a private company for a paltry 1.17 billion dollars. The lease is for seventy five years and so far the city has been on the short end of that deal.

On Tuesday evening, Dennis and I drove over to a local bar. Dennis got lucky, there was a parking spot directly in front of the bar. It was one of those fancy new metered spaces where you pay at a box with a touch screen and a credit card. So I left Dennis out front while I went in to grab two stools and order two beers. Ten minutes later, Dennis was still out front. So I went out to see what was wrong. 

"I can't find the app on my phone for parking." 

 "Why don't you just use the touch screen to pay?" I asked. And as I asked that question, I noticed that the touch screen was not working. I poked and prodded the thing until I noticed a little green button a few inches below. Presto, the little computer screen came alive. "There you go, Dennis." And I left him out there to pay for the parking. Ten more minutes passed and his beer was getting warm. I went back out to check on him. This time he was frustrated because no matter how he tried to enter his information, the machine said "No". Now our friend, Doug, came out to help. He was of no help. The fancy ass, computerized parking meter had stumped all of us. Twenty minutes to feed the parking meter, and in the end it was not fed. We took a chance and went in to drink our beers. It's a sad thing when you have to bring an IT specialist with you just to park. No matter. An hour later and we waddled out of the bar. The car was still there and there was no ticket on the car. Kind of like the good old days.