Early last summer I went to the parkade booth to pay my bill. I had been parked forty minutes (The charge for parking there is 50 cents per 1/2 hour). The attendant tried charging me for three hours/all day. When I protested, she took out her calculator and demonstrated to me, with a device that is incremented in hundredths - not 60ths, that I should pay more than I should. I didn't back down and so she gave up, and reluctantly gave me my correct change. Was she just dense, or was her ploy part of a company tactic to bilk drivers who don't pay attention to every last dime?

One saturday last August I went to park in the same parkade. For years there has been no charge to park there on saturdays. I returned to the car to find it had been ticketed. I complained in writing to Imperial Parking people, telling them that they had no sign visible to alert people to any change in policy. They didn't reply, but instead sent a $64 bill from a collection agency.

Is the Imperial Parking Canada Corporation a known gang of con artists?

[ November 12, 2002: Message edited by: Arch Stanton ]

I remember many years ago when travelling with my buddies in Toronto, and a parking attendant wanted to charge the guy driving a buck for using the parking lot to turn around in. We thought that hillarious.

London used to have quite a problem with an outfit called Q.A.P. towing. A bunch of pirhanna's, they were.

Unfortunately, the owner was not terribly asstute to politics. If he would have stuck to towing just workin' joe and jill's cars, he would still undoubtedly be in business. But the egalitarian minded towing pirhanna towed everyone. Newspaper reporters, doctors, city councellors, etc.

Needless to say, when he started towing "important people", the London Free Press and Church Bulletin started running articles on how to get your car out of compound without paying, and how to just ignore the threats to take you to court for the fee.

The owner ended up in jail for something else at one point, and a fellow inmate who must have had his car towed and held for ransom by the owner assaulted him.