Parking attendants may have a pretty well-defined
job description, but if we go back a step further, why does the profession even
exist? If it were purely a matter of money, the government could have simply
hiked up service tax by, say, 0.3 percent to recover their cost and private
contractors would have been busy finding other ways to dupe the public. No, it’s
because the average human being is so fundamentally stupid and selfish that he
cannot be trusted to drive into a parking lot on his own, find an empty spot, and
park there without a) taking up three spots, b) blocking someone else’s way in
or out, or c) getting into a 20-man brawl because someone looked at him funny (kya dekhra hai bhanchod?). The average
human being is so daft that he cannot navigate the most insignificant of tasks
without regulation and supervision, which is also why you have those guys who
are specially hired to stand inside the men’s bathroom and hand out paper
towels and awkward smiles to patrons.
If we look at it, the issue of parking itself evokes
some pretty serious debates. Like how malls can charge 80 bucks or more just so
you can leave your car and spend money on things you don’t need. (Is it just
because of that fancy computerized ticket they give you, a ticket which, if
lost, leads to a further fine?) I could talk about my own poverty, or the
poverty of the guy who drives to Emporio mall in Vasant Kunj in a big car with
AC and everything and spends upwards of Rs. 8k of his family money acquired
through potentially questionable means on those ridiculous pointy shoes and
then proceeds to complain about the high parking prices. Then there’s the guy
who does the same thing but doesn’t even bother complaining about parking, and
theoretically, he should be the hero of this little morality tale, but let’s be
honest, we all hate that guy. But this isn’t about the pointy shoes and Ray Ban
wearing chump, it’s about the guys (barely) standing on a rung much lower in
the class ladder (oh no he didn’t.), the parking attendants.
Now, these guys are usually young-ish – in their
twenties – with names like Ravi or Anil or Vicky or Raj or Vijay. Or, if they’re
older, they’re called Yadav Ji or Sharma Ji or Gupta Ji or Pandey Ji or Mishra
Ji. That’s all speculation really, because I don’t actually know their names,
and I genuinely don’t care either. And why should I? First, I don’t entirely
subscribe to the school of thought where you need to know the name of your
service professional in order to boss them around and get your job done (not
that these guys are ‘service professionals’ in any way). Secondly, they don’t care
about my name either. At lots I frequent, to them I’m probably the silver Brio
guy, or the checked shirt guy, or the guy who first litters then looks around sheepishly with guilt or embarrassment. So why should I be their friend? Is there any reason why I should
allow some latent middle class guilt to rise to the surface? I don't have to be nice to them; it’s not like they’re
waiters who directly control my external spit intake in a given week or pilots
who are responsible for my future existence one million feet in the air. The
worst they can do (besides stealing my car, which would totally suck) is to
scratch the car a bit, something that I’m also quite the expert at. So why
should we be pals?
It’s not a class thing (“I’m not classist, I know
lots of poor people.”), it’s that these guys are complete assholes. They’re opportunistic slackers
enjoying the benefits of a prolonged case of disguised unemployment. They sit
around, sing songs, get into the odd fight or two, they jot down your number
and hand over a slip to you, and then they ask for the money they’ve earned
with pride. In fact, they have so little to do that they’ve universally
mastered this technique of ripping out the receipt from the receipt booklet in
such a way that the parking amount is expertly left behind in the booklet so
you can never know exactly how much you’re supposed to give them. Oh, and when
you park, they will always, always ask
you to move the car forward, like, just a
little bit more, and then they’ll tell you to stop. You know, because those
extra four inches are the most critical part of parking a car, and it’s
absolutely imperative that you stop when they tell you to stop and not when you
think it’s OK to stop because they’re professionals and they don’t tell you how
to do your job, right?
There is, of course, a percentage of employees in
this fairly unskilled industry which tries to add a degree of skill and
sophistication to their work. They’re the ones who’ll tell you exactly how to parallel
park, or maybe even do it for you, and maybe even handle your car keys if you
trust them enough. They’ll calculate the number of hours you’ve left your car
parked at a spot and the money you owe them in real time so that you don’t have
to.
(As an aside, the progressively increasing rate of
parking bothers me. Yes, you’re blocking a spot for too long, but you’re also
reducing your and in turn your country’s carbon footprint by not wasting fuel
and taking up spots elsewhere, you're directly and positively contributing to the road
rage woes of the city by making sure you're not on the road getting into a fight over lane changing. If anything, the longer you park, the lesser you should
pay.)
And, as in the case of the main lot at Khan Market,
they’ll create a zig-zag compendium of intricate shapes and patterns, expertly
handling the flocks of cars coming in and out at an express speed at par with McDonald’s
home delivery. These are the Mozarts and Picassos of the parking attendant
world, which isn’t saying much. But it is saying something, but not much.
But on a whole, they’re a mysterious breed of
humankind. You can honk at them and yell at them and ask for their help and
gesture frantically and they have this smooth ability to completely ignore
everything you’re doing, only to mysteriously appear just as you’re about to
finish the process of parking, where they’ll tell you to move your car four to
eight inches forward before heroically asking you to stop. Then they’ll make
sure to give you the receipt with your car number on it. Then, when you’re
leaving the lot, they’ll again be absent, probably off somewhere perfecting
their ripping techniques. As soon as you reverse out of the lot and somehow
manage to reach that last point in your journey before you're off, they’ll be
there, knocking on your car door, asking for your money.
You could argue with them about their incompetence
and how they don’t deserve to be paid, but somehow, at that point, they seem to be looking right into your soul. It’s an oddly embarrassing moment when they knock – they’re
giving you an understated look that implies that you were about to speed off into
the sunset without paying them even if that’s untrue although it usually isn’t –
and you feel like you should just get it over with and go back home and not
think about them. So you give them 10 bucks and they ask for 20. If you give
them 20, they ask for 30. You give them 40 and, make no mistake, they will ask
for 50. You give them 50…
