I admit I was worried as I drove my aging white SUV toward downtown Duluth. I’d heard that they’d junked all the parking meters and somehow hooked parking regulation up to so-called smartphones.
I’m not so smart on my smartphone. Oh, I can check the outside temperature and answer it if somebody calls, but I don’t text stuff. I don’t use the keyboard at all — my fingers are too fat. I’ve always had fat fingers, much to my chagrin in junior high school. I’m over it now. The chagrin.
So, when I read in this newspaper that the city is now controlling parking downtown with cell phone QR codes instead of parking meters, I pondered: What the devil is a QR code? Looking it up, I learned it’s “a machine-readable code consisting of an array of black and white squares, typically used for storing URLs or other information for reading by the camera on a smartphone.” Oh, is that all. I enjoy storing URLs, especially on weekends when the sun is shining. Yeah, right.
But I was still feeling plenty nervous venturing onto parking meter-less Superior Street in my SUV last month.
I had to park to pick up my taxes from the guy who can figure them out. I’m not so hot on taxes either. But where to park? How to pay with no meters? Would I get a ticket? How much do they fine you these days? Last time I paid a parking ticket they cost $2. That was sometime in the last century.
These were my thoughts as I rumbled on wondering if my muffler was shot. Jeez, I’m thinking, if I can’t park, I can’t get my taxes and send them in on time. I could get arrested by the IRS and sent up the river for an undetermined amount of time or even be deported to Mexico, although I like their food in spite of being a (half) Scandinavian hotshot from Doolut.
I determined that the taxes were more important than a potential parking ticket, so I decided I’d just pull into an angle parking place and take my chances. Alighting from my vehicle, I noticed a nearby small metal box about waist high atop a pole and decided to check it out.
What a relief! A new style parking meter that covered the whole block. It had a keyboard featuring numbers 1 through 10 and the entire alphabet A through Z. Now I was getting somewhere. There were instructions at the top indicating what you should do before inserting coins in the slots at the bottom.
I can do that, I figured, perusing the instructions. First, they told me to put in my license plate number. Made sense. That’s how they’d know which car was which once I got to the stage where I was to put money in. So, I punched in my plate number JIM8O6 (not my actual plate number or my locker number at the Family Sauna) and moved on to the next instruction.
Next, they told me to put in my date of birth, which I willingly did. That got rejected with the message that I am too old to be driving. Hmm. Moving on, the gizmo told me to punch in my Social Security number, my weight, my height, my shoe size and educational attainment — choose 12 years, 14 years, 16 years, graduate school level (up to 20), and degrees such as B.A., M.A. PhD, MD, DDS, DM&IR, Etc.
No problemo. I don’t mind spreading my Social Security number around the globe. It can lead to some interesting e-mails from needy rich guys in Nigeria who need help accessing their money.
Yawn…I was getting drowsy writing this. Suddenly ZZZs and then a dream:
In the dream after I punched in all of the requested information, the parking box told me to insert a gold coin with President Trump’s image on it. I didn’t have one on me so I darted into a nearby bank, putting my hand in my jacket pocket with the index finger pointing like a gun. I ordered a teller to give me a Trump coin because I didn’t want to over park in my spot with no meter. She smiled and pressed a button and a loud noise rang throughout the bank lobby, scaring customers. There were three.
Soon guards and cops showed up in my dream placing handcuffs on my wrists behind my back, causing me to wonder how I was going to eat lunch. And then there was the problem of picking up my taxes and getting them mailed by April 15. And how could I sign the tax forms with my hands handcuffed behind me? My doze was becoming a night…er… daymare.
When my nose hit the keyboard I had been typing on, I suddenly woke up. What a dream, but it was no dream that the parking meters are gone. Used to be two bits for 10 minutes and done. Done is right.
Oh, and what about my taxes? They got sent in but I’m starting to smell tacos.
Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.
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