Blank Frank's Carlisle Conundrum

- or -

The Da Carlisle Code

First Issue 10/04/2006

Introduction

Carlisle is an English city strategically located close to the Scotland / England border. It has a long and rich political, military and commercial history covering thousands of years, and its Norman castle remains a dominant feature today, more than 900 years after construction started.

. . . None of which is remotely relevant to this page.

Moving rapidly onwards

Take a look at the following three photos - actually one photo followed by enlarged details of two areas, taken on 4th April, 2006 in Devonshire Walk car park - if you please.

Now - tell me to slow down if I'm going too fast - what do you notice when you look at the enlarged areas? Yes, the coins allowed in the meter are 10p, 20p, 50p, £1.00 and £2.00, and, oh, look - the charges include the magic numbers 75p, £2.25 and £3.75. You have 30 seconds to create the magic numbers using any arrangement of the coins allowed and some plus (+) signs. Tick tock tick tock. Diddly da, diddly dum. Plonk. Time up. How did you get on? Hmmm - about as well as I did, then.

So what's that all about? Bureaucracy gone mad? Daylight robbery? Do I smell another conspiracy? If they had only had the honesty to ask me for £2.30 in the first place, I would have been reeling but would grudgingly have coughed up the cash since I did in fact wish to park - but this is something else - another stealth tax. I was furious.

Come to sunny Carlisle and park in Devonshire Walk - it'll only cost you £2.25. Will it heck - it'll cost you £2.30 and not a penny less, regardless of what the tariff sheet says, laddie.

The hidden message revealed?

Well, this is not quite as open-and-shut an investigation as I'd first thought.

I'm not local to the area so I had to do a little digging in the more famous knowledge repositories of the world, which revealed that new car park charges were applied in Carlisle on April 1st, 2006. Coincidence? Possibly.

The message could be that someone in the Finance Department of Carlisle City Council - who may not actually be accustomed to paying for parking - decided to apply an across-the-board increase to the charges without doing a full risk assessment of possible dire consequences resulting from breaches in the round-it-up-to-the-next-10p rule.

Could be the Council thinks visitors will be too thick to notice, or - if they do notice - will be so put-off by the extortionate parking charges, regardless of the bonus 5p rip-off, that they won't come back anyway, so may as well stick them for as much as possible.

Consider, for a moment, the ticket machine. It might be tempting to suggest that the powers-that-be had decided to outlaw 5p coins because they didn't want the electronic mugger stuffed with small change. Ah-ha. The irony here is that a 5p coin weighs exactly half as much as a 10p coin (I checked) and is made of the same metal, therefore the same sum of money would have the same mass regardless of its 5p / 10p composition, and, although geometry and random / non-random packing issues are likely to have an influence, it seems at least distinctly possible that the 5p coins - being smaller in diameter and thickness, therefore less granular - will pack into a tighter space than 10p coins, so on this basis it would be better to ban 10p coins so the machine would need emptied less often - AND WE WOULDN'T GET RIPPED OFF. No excuse there then, IMHO.

So, sorry folks, I don't have the difinitive answer to the Carlisle Conundrum yet, but one thing's for sure - it makes me sick to the heart of my bottom.

And finally Esther . . .

On a slightly lighter note, the exit barrier of the car park was pretty funny. It didn't work. A less aptly-named appliance I have rarely seen - or more perfectly-named, depending on your point of view, because it blocked all attempts at exit. Car after car drove up to it, whereupon it promptly didn't open. Various drivers were seen to make several approaches at different speeds and from different angles, always finishing with a timely application of the brakes, before giving up and exiting through the in-only opening - to the general consternation of innocent parties trying to enter same. What a larff! Couldn't see any hidden cameras, but that shouldn't surprise you. The End. Toodle pip.

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