This happened a week ago, but with my computer troubles (I promise I’ll update about my super glue episode soon) I haven’t been able to write as conveniently as I used to. So some things might have a little delay to them. Bear with me.

Carnegie Mellon has a parking garage for visitors and for faculty or staff who don’t have a parking permit elsewhere. By purchasing a garage card, you get to save a lot of money. The good news is that it only costs $3.00 to buy. The bad news is that, starting this Fall, CMU is celebrating the extra level added to the garage by prohibiting students from having discount cards. Apparently we weren’t paying CMU enough in tuition.

Thankfully, students who already had a card were not required to hand over their card, and since my card expired in June, I was set. What I didn’t account for was leaving my card in the machine after a long day at school.

Now, the person who programmed the payment machine was obviously thinking ahead. If a card gets left in the machine for longer than a minute, it gets sucked back in to prevent theft. I like that idea in general. Reason follows that you store these cards in a separate compartment, and give the security guards (who are there 24/7) a key to said compartment so that nobody is ever caught in a situation where they have to pay twice.

Unfortunately, they must not have followed through with my train of thought (maybe it wasn’t logical?). Instead, the person with access to this separate compartment is the parking garage attendant who works 9-5 on weekdays. So there I was, at 8pm on a Friday, trying to convince this security guard that I shouldn’t pay a $25 lost ticket fee since the machine was technically the one that lost my ticket.

The excitement didn’t stop there. Apparently, along with storing the card in some separate compartment, the machine also deactivates the card. No problem, you can just activate it again… if you are allowed to have an active card in the first place. Oh wait, you’re a student? That’s unfortunate.

I appreciate the gesture to help out some of the more absent-minded people in the world - Grad students are certainly worked hard enough. However, I think you’re adding complication to a task if you don’t follow through with the assist. Maybe someone should do a user study.