(Goodness knows what it stands for!!)
There has to be a funny side to the recent spate of parking meter ladies and gentlemen in Bulawayo CBD.
Find a funny side or cry...
Always legally compliant, I make sure that I have got it right when I venture cautiously into town.
Park within the lines (if you can find them) keep far away from all yellow lines (if you can see them).
Always carry a stash of one dollar bills cos they seldom have change and they can never find wifi!!
Most of the TTI guys are most pleasant, it's actually wonderful to see so many young people gainfully employed.
But the mere sight of the 'Mad Max clamping and towing crew' racing around in the dreaded bakkie, is enough to turn one's bowels to jelly!!
They look totally Gung ho !! One almost expects them to have knives clenched between their teeth, wearing red bandanas and with a patch over one eye!!
I am fully supportive of the fact that law and order needs to be established within the town. We have lived too long with flagrant displays of lawlessness and the rules of the road must be adhered to.
No double parking, no reversing out of centre parkings, no parking in areas that are demarcated as such. We still have a 1960s rules of the road book - The Highway Code - and I wonder if they even exist now!!
Mom taught me to drive with these rules, I taught my three kids to drive using that code, I taught Charlie's girls too drive and also taught my favourite gardener knowing full well that he would leave me when he fulfilled his lifelong dream to become a Mortician!!
However it takes a brave man to park in town knowing the uncharted vagaries of the local Bulawayo enclave. Parking is certainly freely available, and one ticket lasts for a whole hour!! Parking one's vehicle is a problem though, making sure not one hair of the tyres touches the line is a different kettle of fish!!
Am I forward enough backward enough are my wheels straight . I am a soaking, wringing wet mass of tension by now, in this heat, after climbing in and out of the car to examine my handiwork...
All the while three youngsters are pestering me, fighting amongst themselves to be my car guard.
The parking attendants are friendly, if hot and bothered themselves in those vivid green, plastic, luminous jackets and black trousers. They all have the cutest little portable credit card machines with fascinating, nifty little printers. By the time they track down a wifi signal, swipe your credit card, print your ticket, ten minutes of your precious allowed sixty minutes is accounted for!!