Planning to park in a lot with a credit card machine anytime soon? Then you need to see what happened to one woman who paid to park at one of the new automated machines, yet still ended up with a big parking ticket.
Susie Johnson was furious. She parked in a downtown lot, and paid for it at the lot's credit card machine.
"I paid the $10 in the automatic thing," Johnson said. "And you get this little ticket and it says place up on dashboard."
She says she dropped the little piece of paper in her car before she walked off. So she was stunned to come back to find a bright green enveloped under her wiper.
"We saw this and it was wrapped in plastic, and it was a ticket for $60," she said.
Accused of Not Paying
The ticket accused her of not paying, something she couldn't comprehend. "I said there's no way, there's no way I can get a ticket for paying to park there," she said.
We called the parking company, ABM Parking, the nation's second largest parking company and the operator of the lot, which quickly found the problem.
The company sent a photo of Johnson's car's windshield, with the time and date hidden, because the ticket had slid down too low. Only the top was visible.
Johnson says they should still have realized she had paid. "You can still see that its a paper parking slip," she said.
Lesson for Everyone
But an ABM spokesman said "attendants are instructed to issue tickets if they can't read the date and time," because people are always trying to scam the system.
However, they agreed to drop the $60 fine.
But it's a reminder to everyone who parks downtown to make sure that paper slip is visible, so you don't waste your money.
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Don't Waste Your Money is a registered trademark of the EW Scripps Co.
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