Today I Owned a Customer

I don’t really care if someone scams the system for free parking. It happens all the time, and more often than not I’m powerless to do anything. However, on the off-chance that I catch someone blatantly trying to scam the system, in person or on camera, I try my best to screw them royally. Today was one of those days.

I was at the Monitoring Station, a room with a bunch of screens showing a bunch of parking lots, when I saw someone take a ticket at the entrance, give it to someone else, then back out. Now, if you park for less than 5 minutes, you get free parking. Well, I figured I’d be powerless to stop him so I waited for him to drive to the exit and put the ticket in the exit machine, so I could get a glance at his license and send him a bill for a whole day of parking (or maybe a week of parking, to teach him a lesson).

Only, he didn’t drive to the exit, but, put it into one of our payment machines to get the ticket validated. Guess he thought he still had to put it into this machine first, before putting it into the exit machine to open the gate (which is the normal process of things). Excellent! I checked the transaction to make sure it was the scammer, and sure enough the amount was $0.00. I turned on the intercom and heard a bunch of laughing, then, before they could put the ticket into the exit machine to open the gate, I shut off the machine. Gotcha bitch!

Customer: “What the fuck? The machine’s off. What do we do now?”
Red: “Hi there, how can I help you?”
C: “Yeah, your machine’s off. We can’t put our ticket in your machine, can you open the gate?”
R: “Yeah, I turned it off. Go back to the paystation and pay for parking and I’ll turn it back on.”

This was followed by me doing a victory dance inside the monitoring room. Lots of air-thrusting going on, and chest thumping too. I checked the payment to make sure they paid and it was $2.25.

!!

Bunch of cheap bastards. Well, since they were more or less forced to stay there until I turned on the machine…

Red: “$2.25? Wow, really? That’s less than the TTC! Seriously, you did that for $2.25? Damn…”
Customer: *turns music louder*

And so I let ‘em stew there for a bit, before I eventually put the machine back in service for them.

Lesson learned kiddies: don’t be cheap.