As part of the drive to use up all of my remaining vacation by the end of the financial year I had Friday off work. After we’d been to Emma’s swimming lesson at Twyford School, we all headed in to Eastleigh for a bit of shopping. This involved taking back Emma’s new shoes which she’d managed to wreck on the slide on the way home from buying them. Shoes for a two year old can hardly be called fit for purpose if the soles can’t cope with a slide! I then went to the running shop to get some new road and off-road shoes whilst Christine went to Sainsburys where we’d parked.
The shoes themselves may have been fairly expensive but I expect that. It was the parking at Sainsburys that proved to be more so! Unfortunately I’d held on to the card for the parking and failed to answer my mobile when Christine called me to ask for it. She then failed to answer her phone when I finally made it to Sainsburys and couldn’t find her. Eventually we found one another and queued to get the card validated at one of the tills. Unfortunately, when we made it to the car park exit it transpired that we had exceeded the 2 free hours (there is no entry time printed on the card you get). What I had never noticed before is that 2 hours is also the maximum time for parking after which there is a £50 fine!
It was even more unfortunate that I bumped in to the parking attendant on the way in to the shop. As you’d expect, he didn’t show much mercy so I headed in to the shop to plead our case there. I failed again but, as the manager explained, it was a fair cop as the whole idea is to stop people parking there and then going off shopping in town. What I was less pleased with was that if, as a Sainsburys customer, you lost the card, you would only be charged £5. Sadly it was too late to change my story at this point (honesty never pays). It also turned out that paying your fine on the spot also isn’t the best thing to do. Fortunately I didn’t as the machine wasn’t taking credit cards. If, instead, you took a fine ticket from the attendant, it’s only £30 if you pay in 14 days. In future I’ll restrict myself to buying one pair of shoes at a time!
So annoying but nothing you can do about it! Anither one of those things sent to try us…