Monday, May 21, 2012

Park it

You know how some people (um, generally not including myself) cruise the parking lots at the mall during the holidays, on the lookout for some poor schmuck backing out of a spot close to the door? You know how they stalk their prey from the time they walk out the mall door, loaded with bundles, until it is clear the hapless victims are headed to a car in a prime spot? How they hover, ready to slide into the spot the instant it is (mostly) vacated?

Our Parking Services department is forcing us to behave the same way during the bi-annual parking spot assignment process.

Several weeks ago we were notified that the sign up process would be done on-line this year. Yay! I like on-line sign ups; the less paper on my desk, the better.

But the message on the website said they were temporarily down; check back on May 14th.

On May 14th, it said to check back on May 15th.

That message hung around for a couple of days, finally changing to "the site is temporarily closed" on about Thursday.

Lot assignment is theoretically based on seniority, but according to Parking, how early you get your application in may have some bearing on whether or not you are assigned your preferred lot.

I've turned into a stalker. Every couple of hours, I check to see if they have finally fixed the site. It's not so much that I don't think I'll get back into our lot, but that if I by some strange glitch don't, the next lot I would probably get into is about five blocks away. It's not so bad after work, but it can be pretty dark (and scary) down here at 6:15 in the morning.

One can only hope the website is fixed in time for the new stickers to be processed before the August 1st start of the new parking year.

2 comments:

melissa said...

Should be so simple. Hope they can get on the stick quickly so you can put this in the 'already-done-it' file!

Take care, girlfriend. :)

mrs_fooko said...

Ahhh, technology!