Car Park

First up, I figured out why I dislike traveling on the number 11 bus so much. (You’ll recall this is the Birmingham Outer Circle bus route which trundles around the suburban sprawl of this great city in a little over two hours, if you’re lucky.) It occurred to me while coming home that I’ve never seen these busses bunched up in groups of two or three, a common occurrence with routes in and out of the city centre, and then I realised why. They stick to a very strict timetable which seems to assume the worst. This means they are rarely late but the flipside is that when traffic conditions are good (which they usually are when I travel thanks to my early starts) they have to slow down to make sure they’re not early. The usual tactic to prevent rampant earliness is to stop for a few minutes at key bus stops, which is kinda irritating when you’re in a bit of a hurry, but this isn’t enough for the 11 so the drivers meander along at a speed not dissimilar to a motorised wheelchair, lending an air of endless purgatory to the occasion.

So anyway, having been offered and turned down numerous jobs when I was ill, some of which were pretty keen and in one case terrifically local, I of course had nothing last week and was getting somewhat desperate. December is always a dry time for industrial temping (the factories shut down for Xmas so the supply chain grinds to a halt) and if I’d thought things through I would have worked solidly through October and November and done GDFAF now, but I don’t think things through because spontaneity is good and I am stupid. But I finally got the call from Wide-Boy Tim at the agency with some work and somewhat amazingly it’s a job I’ve never done before. For this weekend and every weekend up to the new year I shall be a car park attendant in Solihull.

Possibly the best thing about the job is the jacket. As you know, I’ve become something of an aficionado of high visibility clothing and have acquired quite a collection of waistcoats, but I’ve never worn a jacket quite like this. You probably know the sort – a large padded waterproof jacket commonly worn by persons working in out-door traffic related activities that don’t involve a lot of movement. I’d suspected they might be warm but never imagined how comfortable they are. It’s like wearing a perfectly tailored duvet, snug but not restrictive, large but not balloon-like and quite sleekly cut. At the end of the day I put on my own padded US Army issue extreme cold weather parka and it utterly paled in comparison. I covet this coat. I need this coat. Unfortunately it’s got a huge Solihull council logo on the back so even if I do manage to “acquire” it I can’t really wear it in public, but they do sell them at the army surplus store. That said, I was told to write my name in it so when the job is over, who knows…

My job is to support the full time guys during the busy pre-Xmas period. Part of their job is to walk around the car park checking everything is okay, taking abandoned trollies back, checking for lost property and looking disapprovingly at badly parked cars. Probably the main job is just to be a bright yellow presence, deterring the criminal element and making the place seem less like an abandoned concrete maze. Meanwhile the other guys deal with jammed ticket machines, lost tickets and other ticket related traumas, of which there are a lot give the state of most of the customers.

It quickly dawned on me that a multi-story car park central Solihull allows you to experience people at their worst as they move from driving to shopping. Driving turns people into impatient maniacs for whom every second has more value than life itself. Shopping turns people into arrogant tossers who are under the delusion that the world revolves around their solipsistic ego-centric arseholes. And the delightful 1970′s decaying concrete environment of the car park offsets this quite nicely. So a one-way system is seen not as a means to ensure smooth traffic flow while keeping pedestrians safe but as an irrelevance, while areas not designated as parking spaces are seen as parking spaces with no thought as to why they might not be designated parking spaces. And the maximum speed limit would appear to be about 30mph.

My induction was somewhat customer oriented, as everything appears to be these days, so on my first few rounds I made eye contact and smiled but was greeted with so much sour-faced bemusement that I gave up and just ignored everyone, which wasn’t hard as they were ignoring me. Of course the hi-viz does turn you into invisible street furniture which might explain it but my colleagues expressed similar sentiments about our customers. This, by the way, is why you rarely get good customer service in shopping centres. It’s not that the staff are bad people or poorly trained. It’s that shopping centres bring out the worst in people and when you’re subjected to this day in day out your armor is up and there is no benefit of the doubt. Customers are the enemy and will crush you with their words if you give them half a chance.

Thankfully I wasn’t on the receiving end of any of this because my job was simply to walk around the car park every half hour and drink tea. Which, while potentially boring, is actually quite interesting because I’m really getting to know every inch of this car park. It’s the sort of public space that people don’t generally dawdle in and I’m getting paid to dawdle so I’m seeing it in a new light. I took along my old camera – the compact point’n'shoot with the broken battery lid held on with wire – and am taking photos. So far they’re nothing special but I’m hoping by the end of the month I’ll have uncovered something, or at least painted a picture of a car park that not many have seen before.

Oh, and I did get to tell someone off today. On one trip I noticed a car parked where it wasn’t supposed to be and I sighed, tilting my head to one side as I stared at it, wondering how someone could possibly have thought this was an okay place to park. On my next round the car was still there but someone was walking towards it. I approached her with a smile and told her how wrong she was. She expressed confusion and launched into a long and somewhat surreal explanation of how she thought this was okay because somewhere else was okay which I brushed aside and, after telling her not to worry about it (we don’t issue tickets or anything like that) told her her quite sternly not to do it again, which felt really good. With a grin on my space I went back to the office and proudly announced that I’d got one to great cheers from my associates in car park attendance. Unfortunately she was the only catch. I really wanted to get that tosser who parked in the disabled bay without a badge. I mean, what is it with people?

Multi Story Car Park set on Flickr which will be added to over the month.