Talking to Parking Eye's computer

Last week we published advice from a reader about how to get your money back or fight a parking 'fine' from the company Parking Eye who seem to send out £100 'fines' for the slightest indiscretion by users of their car parks near Crewe station.

As well as being widely read, the article encouraged an Audlem resident to visit AudlemOnline headquarters to share his experience.

We will call him Andrew, as that indeed is the name his friends and family call him.

After various attempts to speak to a human at Parking Eye, Andrew eventually wrote to their computer as that seemed to be the only intelligent thing at their office who might respond.

Yesterday, you may have noticed, AudlemOnline's Thought of the Day was: "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary arithmetic and those that don't."

That Thought was inspired in part by Andrew's decision to address the Parking Eye computer in binary. Now, as your editor is one of the kinds of people to which binary is a bit of a mystery, and as we suspect that will apply to many readers too, we have translated Andrew's letter back from binary to English. He said:

"You have recently sent me a parking charge notice (details given) showing pictures of the front and rear of my car with dates and times imposed it appears that the software that somebody wrote for you is inadequate as it is not capable of identifying my registration unless the whole registration was entered it fails to realise that humans are using the car park and are not as clever as you on entering the car park at 08.19 i purchased a ticket at 08.20 as far as i can remember the instructions stated please enter your registration number which i did and entered the number 62 your inadequate software has not been able to realise that this relates to my registration dg62 please can you get a human being to help you with the matter if you would like a copy of my ticket to show your hopeless masters please let me know i am also very concerned that your business model has received my money on a ticket and as you cannot identify the vehicle you have just kept it so maybe they should use these ill gotten gains to upgrade your software"

Non-binary users will guess from the above that Andrew's version of binary did not put too much emphasis on punctuation, but at least the computer responded.

Andrew has since received a letter cancelling the parking charge. However, the absence of any apology in the letter seems to show, Andrew says, the computer clearly lacks any manners and should be taught some when next it has a program update.

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