Lawyers Road Review

In Seattle the motorist is lost in a vast uncaring world and only finds meaning when he reaches the city limits on his way out.

Street parking is dangerous. One can be easily trapped by those who park around your car when you have left it believing escape will be available at a moment’s notice. Trapped like mice! Rats!

This photo was taken on my “way” to work one morning.

Parking here has been a problem for a generation, but now with the advent of the QR Code the experience is simply impossible.

For anyone born before 1965 listen up: A QR Code is that strange square of black and white squares that are read, apparently, by some software which is acquired elsewhere but stored on the driver’s cell phone.

Scan it, Damn it!

Delay when paying with a QR code is a constant. What if you are late for the play? What if you are just stopping for a minute? What if you have to use the restroom? What if you don’t have a cell phone?

I have a cell phone. So does everyone who owns a car apparently, but what if you do not? What if you barely can run the cell phone, like me? Can’t park here. At least once we paid full price for a 24 hour stay when we only needed an hour. While we got the cell phone to work, there was no means to adjust the time requested. We were robbed.

Sometimes we do not pay at all because we cannot get the code to work and risked a tow, which for the uneducated I now advise runs in the neighborhood of $500.

I try to get around this by prepaying on line while still at home. Occasionally this works. Twice I have gone to the wrong lot and paid twice for the effort, driving into the wrong lot. After all, parking lots all look the same, don’t they?

The next morning arrives the inevitable e mail asking me to “rate my experience”.

Maybe it is me, but somehow parking should not be an “experience”. It supposed to be easy, right? Take this guy, an innovation in parking. “Curb Parking” as we call it locally.

Imagine our relief on a recent outing one late afternoon when we found a space and believed this relic meter would rescue us from the drama that is parking in Seattle.

We were our way to a seminar at Seattle University. It was getting dark and the face of the machine was impossible to see. It is only now I can make out the hopeless cry of another motorist attempting to use this meter inscribing “Stay High or Die” on the face of it. Right, dull the pain before you try to park in Seattle.

Confronting this meter, we deduced we needed to enter the license plate number first, but then what? We tried a credit card. Nope, will not work. I have coins in the car for this situation, and dropped several into it. Negative.

So we locked the car and walked away, and forgot about the risks of non-payment for parking in Seattle during the lecture. Upon return we found no ticket under the windshield wiper.

Was it luck? Or a recognition by those who govern parking in Seattle the entire exercise is hopeless and have pity on the existentialist motorist.

Check out this confusing sign near Whole Foods. What?

The relic meter nearby appeared to be a promising means to pay. But it was a Sunday, and no payment was due, at least that is what the otherwise confusing sign told me. What a quaint value from a long forgotten and more civilized time.

Woe be tied to any of you from the eastern portions of this state who think it would be “nice” to visit Seattle. It is not nice. It is instead an existentialist experience and parking here only underscores the individuals fundamental doubts about his own value, and renders absurd his choice to try to visit Seattle.

Be afraid, be very afraid.