Parking. It’s my nemesis. My archenemy. The Moriarty to my Sherlock. The Lex Luther to my Superman. The Torvill to my Dean. We simply don’t get on. And whilst I despise car parking generally, I am especially averse to parking anywhere in the immediate north of the city. Especially Fitzroy, where the hipsters roam and beard wax is in plentiful supply. In Fitzroy, they treat parking like something requiring punishment and go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible.
Parking. It’s my nemesis. My archenemy. The Moriarty to my Sherlock. The Lex Luther to my Superman. The Torvill to my Dean. We simply don’t get on. And whilst I despise car parking generally, I am especially averse to parking anywhere in the immediate north of the city. Especially Fitzroy, where the hipsters roam and beard wax is in plentiful supply. In Fitzroy, they treat parking like something requiring punishment and go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible.
I was heading to Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. For those unfamiliar with it, Gertrude Street is deep within Melbourne’s hipster hinterland. Rivers of almond milk run freely and it rains irony in Gertrude Street. You can’t turn around without tripping over quinoa or being attacked by a herd of wild tofu. Despite the dangers, I had the best of reasons for going there. I was meeting up with some friends I hadn’t seen in ages for lunch.
Naturally, I prepared as best I could. I looked up the route and calculated approximate travel times, taking into account whether or not there was football at the MCG (there wasn’t). I programmed my destination into the GPS and prepared a small backpack with supplies; including matches, a raincoat and a flare gun before setting off. Melbourne really is a city of two halves. Your allegiance is either to the south or north of the river. Crossing the Yarra is like entering another country, full of strange customs and, if not another language, then certainly another accent where young people strangle their vowels as if consuming an especially large lozenge.
Surprisingly, Punt Road didn’t give me any trouble. To be safe, I kept the doors locked and remained vigilant at traffic lights, lest someone should launch themselves across the bonnet and attempt to clean my windscreen. I made it to Gertrude Street at the exact time the computer had told me I would. All I needed to do was find somewhere to park the car before going to lunch. I should have known that trying to find a place to park in Fitzroy was tempting fate. Fool that I am, I began the diligent process of crawling along various side streets.
There were of course, no available car parks. Actually, that’s not quite true – there were plenty of car parks, it’s that they were only available to residents; meaning that if I took one, I was at risk of being captured by angry locals, dragged to the town square and held in stocks before being pelted with organically grown fruit. I kept driving, without success. By this point, I wondered whether it might’ve been quicker to have walked from home as I was no longer in the postcode in which I’d started.
Eventually, I found somewhere to park that was a phenomenal distance from my ultimate destination. Lucky I had my emergency supplies. All I needed to do was buy a ticket but, even on a Sunday, street parking in Fitzroy is four dollars an hour. That’s some heavy-duty coinage, right there, so I thought I’d try to pay by credit card. I stared at the machine. The machine stared back. It told me that I could only use a credit card if I downloaded an app. There was little choice. I went to the app store. I downloaded the app. I then followed the prompts as it pressed me to tell my entire life story. Finally, I pushed a button to trigger a confirmation email with my password. Only the email didn’t arrive. I was snookered.
I emptied my pockets. I checked behind the seats and the glove box. I scoured the footpath. In short, I did everything I could to scrounge up every coin available to me. Holding them in my hand like metallic magic beans, I started to feed the meter. Coin after coin after coin, they landed with a jangle. Then, without warning, all the coins came flooding back out again, leaving me without a ticket. Surely, I reasoned, this was an error? Once again, I patiently deposited the coins and, once more, the machine spat out the coins. On the third time, I noticed a message on the screen –‘use fewer coins’. This, I thought, was an outrage. It’s bad enough they’re charging an exorbitant amount. To criticise my legitimate use of legal tender was beyond the pale ale.
Clearly, they’d decided to make the act of buying a parking ticket as difficult as possible. Once again, I fed the coins into the machine to work out the maximum amount I could use before they all came out again. After several trial runs, I had it all figured out and got a ticket. This gave me one hour and forty-five minutes of parking time, which was roughly how long it was going to take me to walk back to Gertrude Street. I set of a flare to celebrate.
I must have been a sight when I entered the hotel. Windblown, sunburned and crawling on my hands and knees, I made sure to drop breadcrumbs in order to find my way back again. Luckily, lunch made it worth the while. Amazingly, I managed to find my way back to the car later that day. As I pulled out of the parking spot, I felt lighter for having survived an encounter with a parking meter in Fitzroy. Although it’s possible I felt lighter simply because I no longer had eight dollars in coins clogging up my wallet.