Longing for Free Parking

I’m starting to think I am jinxed in the automated parking lot at Pentagon City. The last two times I’ve been there, I wondered whether I would ever get out.

It sounds simple enough. You get a ticket on the way in. You either buy something in a store like Nordstrom’s that gives out tickets to cover a limited amount of parking OR you pay in a machine as you exit the mall.

The last time I went I ended up not buying anything and attempting to use the machine. It took my entry ticket just fine, but continued to reject my charge card. So I simply drove to a booth with an attendant on the way out and tried to pay the $1.50 I owed. She would have nothing less than $16, the cost of a lost ticket, although I kept telling her my ticket was not lost, but rather was in the jaws of the machine outside of Nordstrom’s. At this point she had the nerve to ask why I hadn’t called for assistance from that machine. A little late I would say.

As the line started to get longer behind me I said, “Either you take my $1.50 or I am just going to sit here and all these people behind me are not going to be happy.”

At that point she called for reinforcements. A big burly guy came over and tried to give me the $16 story once again, suggesting that perhaps I had spent the night in the parking lot, how did he know otherwise? I offered him the chance to call my husband and find out that I had left home a mere hour earlier. He finally rolled his eyes and handed the woman some sort of “get out of jail” card. After which she took my $1.50 and raised the arm in front of my car.

Today when I went I was prepared to do the parking thing correctly. As it turns out I bought a new pair of NYDJ jeans in Nordstroms and they gave me the little blue freebie ticket.

As I pulled up to the robotic parking attendant, I made sure to put the green card in first, stripe up, arrow in. But when I then tried to put the blue card in, it kept getting rejected with a message of “Invalid”. I was sure Nordstrom’s was good for $1.50. I pushed the HELP button and a foreign female voice told me someone would come to help me get out.

Meanwhile I looked to my right and saw another frustrated parking patron, who didn’t seem to have as much patience as I had. I pushed the button again and got a rather loud, “I already call him to come.” By this time both of us who were stuck behind bars were getting impatient, especially when the system has a label “ExpressParc.”

After another 5 minutes a man came and dismantled the other woman’s machine and ultimately told her to back up and go out another exit.

He finally came to me and asked for my green ticket, which of course was somewhere in the bowels of the machine. He pulled out the container of tickets, picked one at random, fed it in, and then fed in my blue ticket. Voila, I was free to go! Never did he apologize to me for the fact that ExpressParc was far from it.

What ever happened to free parking? Or even parking meters? They are disappearing too as we rely on more and more complicated machines to allow us to come and go.