Park This

Wow — beautiful sunny April afternoon and I finish all my chores, assignments, and Satanic rituals — how about I spend an hour on the beach?

I grab a tee shirt to sit on and a book. That’s my ritual now: minimalist. A smear of sunscreen on the honker. Car keys, telephone, wallet….oh, yeah. Pants. What a drag.

Ten minutes later I’m parked two spaces from the Charleston Street beach. I whip out the phone to buy 90 minutes’ parking. Punch in the location code, and get a message that “you have entered an invalid location.” I repeat. So do they. WTF?

I try again, this time instructing the device to just use the same code as last time, because the last time I use this Park By Phone app I am right here, a few weeks ago. Same error message.

Well, to hell with this. Technology and I are old enemies, and clearly the battle is on. I find two bucks in my wallet and approach the infernal Master Meter, with its illegible instruction screens that tell customers to follow steps 1-2-3 while providing a punch-pad with a check-mark, A, B, and X. Idiots. #1 for coins, #2 for bills. But there’s no slot for bills.

Now I’m pissed off. I should have been on the beach 15 minutes ago, and I’m still dicking around with this parking crap. I call the number on the sign to complain, and a real live municipal cretin answers the phone. He tells me:

1. There isn’t a slot for bills yet. They need to come out and change over the machines, scheduled for this week.

2. Evidently the phone app I’ve been using for years is suddenly the wrong one, even though it worked a few weeks ago. When I ask him when that was changed, he says it never was, it’s always been this one. No it hasn’t. Yes it has. OMG.

So how the fuck am I supposed to park my car? I have a phone app and dollar bills, and the City of Hollywood won’t allow me to park? “I understand your frustration.”

I try to register over the phone, like the sign suggests, but that goes nowhere. When I attempt to provide the vehicle’s license plate, the voice-recognition screws it up and can’t let me change one digit at a time. There’s no provision for keyboarding in the data. It’s fucking maddening.

I keep a stash of change in the car, a habit left over from the bygone era of functioning mechanical parking meters. I stuff 6 quarters in, get the receipt for the dashboard, and hit the beach. I spend another 10 minutes on the phone trying to register with the new App without success. But if I choose to speak to a representative, they’ll help me — for a one-time charge!

Now I get it. Eat my ass.

It’s not a total waste — hell, a bad day on the beach is better than a good day in the Ebola clinic, right? — and besides, the scenery was lovely. See below. Where else can you observe exposed armpit tumors?

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