Brisbane’s South Bank Park is located in the center of the city. As in most cities, finding a place to park can be tough. On my visit, all the spaces along the street were taken, so I had to use a nearby underground lot.

They’re not free. I drove down a ramp, stopping at a gate to push a button and receive a ticket which I would be required to produce upon leaving.

The semi-automated exit procedure began with pushing my ticket into a slot at a pay station. The machine read my ticket and calculated my parking fee.

My charges for four hours came to $21 AUD—$14. US. Not cheap.

I paid by credit card. The machine encoded that fact on the ticket and returned it to me. Then I had to drive up to yet another machine and insert the ticket there to raise the exit barrier.

Seems like a reasonably organized system, albeit one that requires a lot of effort from the customer. The norm in most of the urban Australian parking lots I used, it works properly for people who are going to work or shopping or to see a movie. But at South Bank Park, people swim. When they do, a problem arises not foreseen by the system designers.

A warning has been taped to the payment machine. Unfortunately, it won’t be seen until after swimming. Alert drivers will recognize the dilemma when they fish their soggy tickets out of their cozzies (bathing costumes). They’ll take their them to the cashier who presumably uses a special device capable of reading them. Or perhaps he simply asks how long they were parked: honor system parking.

But of course there’s always those who blunder ahead. In a hurry or perhaps befuddled by a few too many at one of the park’s pubs, I imagine them jamming damp tickets into the reader slot. The machine gamely sucking them inside, they become reduced to gummy paste. Parking charges are no longer readable, and the ticket machine ceases to be usable by subsequent patrons.

I love it when stuff like this happens—to other designers. It happened to me often enough when I did that kind of work.