A pay machine does one sum. Time in, time out, tariff, fee. It prints the sum on the ticket and on its own till roll. Ours prints one ticket a night, unasked, in an empty car park. The time in on it is a night in 1989. The fee is what thirty seven years costs at today's tariff, and the machine says paid.
I look after the pay machines in a multi storey car park, which means when one jams I am the one who is rung, at whatever hour.
What they do.
You put the ticket you took at the barrier into the machine. It reads the time in, takes the time now, works out the fee, you pay, it prints a receipt and stamps the ticket paid, and everything it does goes on a till roll inside it that I change once a week.
The ground floor machine prints one receipt a night that nobody asked for.
The receipt.
Time in, a Tuesday in March, 1989, 23:14. Time out, the moment it prints, which is about half past two in the morning. Duration, thirty seven years and some months and days, which the machine writes out in full because the field is wide enough. Fee, at the overnight rate, a number that is longer than the field and runs off the edge of the paper. Paid. Card.
The card line on the till roll has a card number on it. Four digits shown, the rest starred, the way they are. The four digits are the same every night.
What has been checked.
The machine, by the company. Software reflashed, clock reset, printer replaced. It prints the receipt.
The ticket. It has read a ticket, by its own log, because it will not print without one. There is no ticket in it afterwards. The ticket tray is empty. It reads a ticket that is not there, from 1989, which is before this machine's model existed, and before the car park had tickets at all, because it was pay and display then and I have a display ticket from that year in a frame in the office.
The card. Our bank has the transaction. A card payment, at half past two, for the amount on the receipt, which is larger than the car park's turnover for the year, and which the bank shows as authorised, and which does not arrive. It is authorised every night and it never settles, and the bank has an open case, and the open case is a year old.
The four digits.
I gave them to the retired man who ran this place in the eighties, because I did not know who else to give them to, and he went quiet, and he asked me to read them again, and then he told me a name.
A man who had parked here in March 1989 and gone into the river, from the bridge at the end of the road, at about midnight, and whose car had sat on level four for eleven weeks with his ticket on the dash, and the ticket, the retired man said, was the thing he remembered, because it was a display ticket for two hours, bought at ten past eleven, and nobody had ever gone back to it.
He had bought two hours. He owed the rest.
What is done about it.
The receipt comes off the roll every night and goes in a folder that I keep, because a receipt is a record and the auditors take the till rolls. The auditors have queried the line once and were told it was a printer test, which is what the company told me, and which the company does not believe either.
What I do.
I look after the machines.
I have started leaving the machine's card reader on at night instead of locking it out, which I used to do, because a card reader that is locked out declines, and the receipt on those nights said declined, and the machine, on those nights, printed the receipt again ten minutes later, and again, and again, every ten minutes until I came in, and the roll was on the floor, and the machine was hot, and the last receipt on the roll, at the top of the pile, said, in the space where the tariff goes, HOW MUCH.
I leave it on. It is authorised. It never settles. I think he is trying, and I think the sum is wrong, and I do not know how to tell a machine that a man's two hours were paid the moment he went off the bridge, and neither does it.