Thursday, February 08, 2007

Park-o-meters

I imagine this may be general information to all those who grew up Okie, but as it turns out the venerable parking meter was invented (1932) and first used here (1935) in Oklahoma.

Don't know if that can be considered an honor or not, but there it is.

One day last week I found myself in downtown OKC, scrambling for some quarters to feed the one-eyed, one-legged, standing silver meter eaters for an hour of Honda parking rental and wouldn't you know it, I was plumb out of 1/4 dollar coins. Too many darn gumballs for the girls at the supermarket.

I being of the masculine gender, didn't think to actually look at the actual parking meter until turning the interior of my car inside out and upside down looking for that single solitary George Washingto quarter dollar that I knew was hiding beneath the decade old french fries, printed out mapquest maps to points unknown and other nameless pieces of car floor trash.

Had I tapped into my inner female and read the darn thing, I would have discovered that these particular meters in downtown OKC took nickels and dimes as well as quarters.

Needless to say (but I will), parking meters that take coinage other than the quarter dollar variety were virtually non-existent in my driving and parking experiences of So Cal. They're out there, but so rare that any Location Manager worth a darn knows to carry nothing but several rolls of quarters in his car for sudden production parking emergencies.

8 dimes and 2 nickels later, my meter was full, my car alarm chirpped, and I had 60 glorious minutes of worry free time to stroll the wind blown avenues of our capital city.

1 comment:

eccentricego said...

Argh, parking meters. Not too long ago I had to go down to the police department to have a background check for a position in my church's daycare. I parked just outside, deposited my coins and went in for the hour or so it took to get the prints. I then proceeded to go out to my car where I found a ticket. It said I did not pay, which I most certainly did, in full I might add. The kicker was that the damn thing was broke, of course they heard that excuse a million times. At any rate I ended up going back into the station ranting and raving, telling the poor clerk off to the point that it made passing by police offers turn an eyebrow. It wasn't very nice of me to take it out on her, and I had to pay the damn ticket of 10 dollars! A very expensive parking meter to say the least. At least I called the lady later when I got home and apologized for my outburst, but I am still bitter about that one.