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Parking Meter

We all know that there are people in this world that are pretty stupid. Yet on occasion I still find myself lost for words having witnessed an act where the only possible words could be “wow… the human race really is doomed…”.

Yesterday Sarah and I went shopping in Brighton (an act of sheer stupidity in itself I grant you). We parked up, went shopping and returned to the car park where we joined the queue to pay for parking. The woman at the front inserted her ticket into the machine whereupon it displayed the message ‘Please try again’ and kept her ticket. The cause of this had been that she inserted the ticket the wrong way up. despite the clear instructions on the machine.
She pressed the intercom button and explained to the nice man (who she presumably thought lived inside the machine – wizard of oz stylie) that she couldn’t get her ticket back. He pressed a few magical buttons and out popped the ticket. “please try it again madam” he said.
This process repeated 3 times. On the third occasion he said he’d raise the exit barrier for her when she got there. He’d charge her for the ticket now, so could she please read him the numbers off of the ticket, and then press where it said ‘ticket loss’ on the top right of the screen. Rather than interpreting this as ‘read the ticket, then press the button’ she chose to interpret it as ‘hold the ticket up against the screen’. She did this so that her friend, the wizard inside the machine, would clearly be able to read the ticket for himself.
No-one in the queue could help, since we were all standing agape at her stupidity.
Eventually she figured it out, said “I hope you lot have better luck than I did” and wandered off.
We waited our turn, paid and returned to our car. As we drove out we passed her, about 30 feet from the ticket machine, presumably waiting for the little men under the car bonnet to bring her car to her.

I feel like my IQ has dropped just from having witnessed it.