On Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:14:06 +0100, Andy Cap wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

Ha! I know that one! They do the same in Lewes. Small panels
distinguish between residents' parking and PAYG spots. But the small
panels are 20 feet up lamp posts. Also they have this trick where its
free at weekends, but *not* on bank holidays.


One of the craziest schemes I've seen and it only lasted a week, was in
Haywards Heath, when you suddenly had to enter your car registration
number, each character being selected by moving a cursor along to the
appropriate letter or number. It was absolute chaos. Funny though.

Our local hospitals used to operate machines a bit like that - only they
just used the numeric keypad, with letters entered a la mobile phone. The
keypad mode had to be changed (with an obscure operation) to swap between
letters and numbers.

After a while they gave up, had the machines modified and now you only
have to enter the numbers.

This 'enter the number' thing was a good way of preventing ticket
trnsferral, until the 'new' car registration number scheme came in a few
years ago....now it's pretty useless, so I don't know why they bother...




--
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