I was reminded of this when I read a “Shower thoughts” post about clocks.
Where I live, there usually is free parking outside of stores and malls, but limited to a short time, such as 15 minutes or a couple of hours. People have parking discs that they rotate to show when they arrived, and put the discs up visible behind their windshields in their cars.
I have an automatic parking timer displayed in my windshield, that shows the time when I parked rounded up to the nearest half/whole hour. It’s a ”set and forget” thing, which auto adjusts to daylight savings. However, it speeds up 1 - 2 minutes a week, which I didn’t see as it rounds up the time, but I found out after a few months.
Once after parking, I took a quick dash into the store, took maybe 5 minutes. When I got back I had received a fine for the equivalent of 80 € for ”parking for 23 hours in a 2 hour spot”. They apparently don’t have to wait five minutes to write out the ticket if the parking timer was so off.
I didn’t contest the ticket, I considered it a learning experience and a reminder to never blindly trust technology.
This is the analogue version of what OP is describing, VERY common here.
TIL these are even a thing
Got a pic of said disc, I’ve never heard of such disc, but am slightly intrigued by it.
The parking disc commonly looks like this:
The sign that states times for free parking can look like this:
.My parking disc is digital and once I set the current time and date it’s supposed to be a set-and-forget as it automatically sets the (rounded up) time to when I arrived:
