2007-03-29
Of Parking Tickets and the Gobbling Machine
As I walked into the carpark of J8, it struck me that we no longer made stops at the machine that took our parking tickets and spat them out again in exchange for coins, and sometimes notes. I don't remember when exactly the ubiquitous grey boxes that read cashcards from a distance began their complete takeover, but I do remember being little, and thoroughly excited at the prospects of ending a shopping trip because it meant meeting the parking-ticket-thing-machine. (I don't even remember what those machines are called, although I have a vague memory of knowing once. Auto Something Something.)
The parking tickets were usually cards. They were thin, somewhere between paper and plastic with a corner cut into a flat, unfriendly edge that was always mean to the soft flesh between finger and nail, despite the latter's consistent hunger for them. But there were some carparks that used golden plastic chips instead. These carparks always made me feel like the rest of the carparks that still stuck to the puritanical cards were backward and old-fashioned.
I loved asking my dad to pick me up so that I could reach that square, hungry mouth that would gobble the ticket away a bit too quickly. When I grew tall enough to perform the task without help, I always got the honour of doing it, because I was the only one "tall enough". The parking tickets that were chips were the all-time favourite though (Alexander Road's Ikea, I believe, has my first cognitive memory of The Chip). Except I always called them Gold Coins. The faint irony of exchanging several real (fine, plated) gold coins for one plastic gold coin never escaped me, but I always liked the plastic one better. From the time the barrier lifted, I would ask most enthusiastically (and somewhat irritatingly, I suppose) for the chip, which I would enclose in my palm, feeling the machine-warm roundness press into my flesh until it was time to surrender it to the gobbling machine.
I liked to ask questions about the Machine. Questions that were never answered, strangely enough.
What happens after the ticket goes in?
The machine reads it, darling.
How?
See this strip of black? It's a magnetic strip, and codes are written onto it for the machine to read.
How do I change the code on it?
And then I would squint and the glossy strip and feel its matt shine with the back of my thumb, my cheek, my lower lip, sometimes scratching it, if I could get away unnoticed.
Thank you Machine
Honey, you don't have to thank it. It's a machine.
I know, but don't machines need to be thanked?
Hm, good point. I guess you can thank the machine if you want.
I will always be grateful for this one little humour my dad gave me. I still thank machines once in a while. When no one watches, once in a while.
I don't remember the last time I used one of those machines. I don't remember when CashCards became familiar. I wonder sometimes what I would've said if I had known that one particular disremembered time I paid the parking fee (with my dad's money) was the last. Then I remember that not so long ago, the idea of extracting stills or short clips from televsion shows with the TV remote was a thing only to be read in Margaret Atwood.
nothing ever happens at 10:29 p.m.