Article content continued

Now, we are learning the new parking stations don’t work in winter.

You might think that cold-weather compatibility would be of the highest priority for any new parking system in Saskatoon. Apparently not. The coin slots often are frozen shut. How often, we do not know, but two of the last three times I tried to plug a pay station, the slot was frozen shut.

The problem apparently is with a little spring-loaded flap behind the coin slot, designed to swing out of the way when you push in a coin. This flap supposedly prevents the insertion by vandals of foreign objects or litter that otherwise would jam up the works. What seems to happen in the cold is that the flap freezes shut, making it impossible to insert a coin.

If you want to look like an idiot, incidentally, standing there in the bitter cold, trying to push a coin into a frozen-shut coin slot is a good way to do it.

When it happened to me, I just left my car there without paying. I could have trudged to another pay station, a half a block away, through the extreme cold, but if it was frozen shut, too, I would have had to kick it five or six times and I didn’t want to do that. Had I been given a parking ticket, not a court in the land would have upheld it. Probably the presiding judge would have likewise tried mightily and failed at minus 30 with his gloves off to get a frozen parking station to take his damn loonie.

We are now at that point in the horror movie where you are thinking, “Well, that’s pretty horrifying, but at least it can’t get any worse.”