Why The *Bleep* Do I Need An App To Park?
When’s the last time you used cash for something other than buying weed? No, buying acid doesn’t count. Do you even remember? Unless you’re in the hospitality, or another tip-heavy industry that nets cash money, you’re probably used to shoving a plastic card into a machine to pay for things.
Or, maybe you’re a super-duper cutting-edge techno-hipster and you exclusively use your fancypants pocket computer to handle your everyday transactions instead.
We’re all kinda used to not really using cash all that much anymore, but every time something that normally takes change gets digitized, it always throws me for a little bit of a loop and makes me want to bitch about it on the internet. That’s what brings us together today, gentle reader.
The meter is deceptive, you see. It LOOKS like it accepts old-fashioned card-swiping, or King Cash himself, but it doesn’t. Someone just disabled these features and slapped a sticker on it demanding we download an app to facilitate a single, simple transaction. I wonder if the solar panel attached to it still works? If so, why not keep the meter on and give people the option to either download the app or pay the old-fashioned way? What if it’s a giant conspiracy to re-route the electricity from all the old parking meter solar panels to a doomsday bunker full of lizard people hidden deep below the city streets?
That last bullet point question is the only logical explanation I can come up with for the reasoning behind this cloud-based tomfoolery. The lizard people are no longer satisfied with their tree fiddy in sticky quarters or from an easily swiped card — oh no, gentle reader — I now have to download an app on my phone and spend 10 minutes dicking around on it to accomplish the same outcome. I thought technology was supposed to simplify and improve our lives, not make it more tiresome and irritating.
I don’t want to download an app to park — shut up and take my sticky quarters, Loch Ness Monster!
This weird technological advance does have one benefit, though. Typically, when I’m parking in an unfamiliar place, I drop a pin on Google maps to assist with navigating back to the safety of my vehicle when it’s time to make an Irish Goodbye. The parking app has a built-in feature for this, which I will admit could be handy for those situations.
Even so, I’d rather not repeat this experience. Like our ancestors, we once more look to the skies for our salvation.
Together, Let Us Pray:
Oh, great Trevor Moore —the Almighty maker of intellectual stoner music — we call upon thee to bless us with a follow-up tune to the one about that dingleberry who invented those annoying chips on credit cards. Just as there was nothing wrong with swiping, there is also nothing wrong with paying for parking with a handful sticky quarters I just dug out of my cupholder. This is the True Way, the Only Way! So Mote It Be!
Photos provided by the Author
