'N SYNC

A Parking Meter Mystery.

OK, for all those who live outside our particular vale of tears, you should know that there is an ongoing three-ring clown circus flaming-poo juggling act here known as some variation of "The Big Parking Meter Fuckup".

(Although it really deserves a full Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich treatment and a spiffy title like “Night Has a Thousand Meters”.

“Down these metered streets a man must go who is not himself metered…”

Something like that.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah…)

"The Big Parking Meter Fuckup" – in brief – is actually pretty easy to get up-to-speed on if you understand four things:

1. It all began with a budget hole, which Da Mare refused to fill with tax money he actually has on-hand already because, as far as he’s concerned, that money is set aside for his Olympics.

(Which, if that’s really the standard now –- if “I don’t wanna” is now considered a sufficiently good enough excuse for civil servants to blow off their sworn public duties -- then I figure the same should certainly be alibi enough for me.

So next time Da City assesses me some goofy new fee for walking on the sunny side of the street on an alternate Wednesday when I don’t live in that neighborhood and am not carrying the right permit to do so, I'll try heading right on over to the Treasure's Office and tell them that, while I'd really like to pay them, the cash I'm currently sitting on is my special tyop-shelf-hooker-reserve-money, so no-can-do my friend!)

2. So instead, Da Mare and his pals decided to fund his budget gap by taking an everyday municipal property -- paid for by We The People and functioning pretty much as-advertised -- and selling it as if were a pair of hot speakers out of the back of his truck.

3. This was done virtually in secret, to a company that then fucked things all up in a massive and publicly embarrassing way...

4. All while Da Mare explained with a perfectly straight face that this was really a brilliant decision, because everybody knows dat da private sector does everything ever so much better and cheaper that those greedy, stupid city workers ever could.

So the new wrinkle?

Well, today Da Mare allowed as how he was getting a little steamed at the company to whom he sold my parking meters off at fire sale prices.

Steamed at them for a very specific reason(from the Sun Times):

Daley losing confidence in parking meter company

September 15, 2009

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Mayor Daley demanded today that Chicago’s embattled parking meter operator synchronize the time on its pay-and-display boxes and void parking tickets tied to time discrepancies.

“That’s unacceptable. They have to void those tickets,” he said.

Daley said the latest in a string of operational problems that have marred the transition to private control has prompted him to lose confidence in Chicago Parking Meters LLC.
…

Pressed on what he could do short of voiding the lease to force the company to shape up, Daley said, “Beating ‘em up every day. Bringing them in and talk to them and say, ‘You have to straighten this out.’”

Avis LaVelle, a spokeswoman for Chicago Parking Meters LLC, said time discrepancies are unavoidable, even though pay-and-display boxes are “synched up every night at midnight with the atomic clock.”

“Synchronization is not absolute, no matter what technology you’re using. I just came from a meeting with six people who have cell phones set by satellite. There were five different times among six people,” she said.
…

Except that’s not true, and the city knows it.

How do they know it?

Because every single city worker already uses a city-wide, time-synchronized system every single day, and has been doing so for the last three years.

See, if you're a typical City worker, you theoretically have to account for virtually every minute of your day, often to a bewildering variety of auditors, supervisors and assorted other Ticktockmen, each of whom use their own, arcane apparatus for measuring the passage time.

And yet despite this proliferation of time-reporting mechanisms, year after year, like clockwork (hehehe) dead people and 12-year-olds would still somehow continue to collect paychecks, and a whole menagerie of clever goofs (often armed only with a meager MacGyver-like array of toothpicks, gum wrappers and clout) would end up with their time-cheating antics splashed all over front pages of our local newspapers (Note to future historians: this all happened during the days when one could speak on Chicago dailies using plurals) thus angering Da Mare, and distracting him from the important work of perfecting vastly higher-order forms of malfeasance.

Until, that is, the Fall of 2006 when his former Chief of Staff decided to buy and install a whole buncha these thingies.


They are, according to the Chicago Clout website, part of a:

…system to monitor the attendance of City of Chicago personnel at the Central District. The new model is a Recognition Systems Handpunch 3000. This should reduce the amount of time sheet fraud that the City of Chicago Department of Water Management has experienced in the Chicago Newspapers.

This is a synchronized city-wide time-keeping system that not only uses magnetic cards, but also "biometric technology" (Built with space age polymers no doubt!)

Which the workers, in turn, watch for accuracy like a fucking hawk to make sure not a single minute of their time is lost --

(City workers shown here on "Wear Your Bowler Hat to Work Day"

lining up at a swipe machine at 4:59)

-- and which Handpunch corporate literature brags:

…transmits the employee’s In and Out transactions to a company’s time/attendance/payroll software. Multiple units can be networked into a central time and attendance record keeping system. Interface software can be tailored to meet multiple record keeping needs, including programmable data management keys that collect specific data when employees’ hands are verified.

Got that?

Since 2006, hundreds of millions of your dollars and the entire payroll and personnel system of the third largest city in America have depended upon the accuracy and temporal synchronization of a whole bunch of little electronic boxes scattered far and wide over the entire city…

…which in 2009, the spokesperson for Da Mare’s hand-picked private, for-profit parking meter company now says is technologically impossible.

In a city where facts, causality and fiduciary rectitude were held in high regard, such a hilariously glaring contradiction dropped smack in the middle of an already-suspect, high-dollar shakedown might spark a little official interest.

Ah, but this is Chicago.

And in Chicago, Da Mare’s whims maketh and unmaketh all things.