Today I drove to Winchester for a training course with Hampshire County Council at their head-offices (The Castle), and probably like many people these days the need to actually carry cash and coin is getting less and less – everywhere takes card anyway…so why don’t ALL parking machines just do the same – simple and easy right….WRONG!

I parked in a car park (I will name it for avoidance – Tower Street, under the Hampshire CC “Castle Complex) offices), and not having any change meant I had no choice but to call up the automated parking helpline…not too much of a problem I first thought, I’m quite “savvy” and I had 15 minutes to master this…

Being “savvy”, I read that if you text “Help” to the advertised number, you can register your parking – easy I thought, perhaps you just text the number, they text you back, you reply with your car registration and parking meter number and they bill your mobile…very wrong, you just get a text back saying call the Premium-rate number on the parking machine – umm, not so helpful then.

So I called the number….15 minutes later (so now 5 minutes late) I’m still punching in details…it was long, painful…and expensive, oh, and by the way, no offer of help from a useful operator! (what is it these days with customer service, I just want to speak to someone who can help!)

Needless to say I gave up, drove out, parked about 5 minutes away on a pay-on-foot car-park (much better) and walked to my meeting….in the pouring rain!

This isn’t the first time, I experienced the same issue in Andover only a few months earlier!

Hampshire County Council, if you read this – please make parking quicker and easier via this method, it’s not rocket science, in fact I imagine that parking a rocket in one of your car-parks is probably easier than chatting to a computer which purposely takes 4 times as long as a human…which I suspect is a strong case for the consumer act to investigate!

Argh – so annoying – has anyone else come across these things or is it just me !?!