Get out of my way!

2008-12-04 12:00

Georgina Guedes

I went to Hyde Park Corner the other morning at about 10:30. I needed to go to the bank to transfer some money to pay for a rather expensive car service. At that time of morning, it should have been a quick zip in and out.

As I entered the parking lot, I found myself wondering what on earth was going on - surely even the most fervent of Christmas shoppers aren't riding the wave of consumerism in such significant numbers at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning?

I drove around for 35 minutes looking for parking. Under normal circumstances, I would have just left, but I had dropped my husband off there before a meeting, so I needed to collect him, and we needed to get to the bank so that we could get our car back. <;p> After visiting every level of both parking garages - save for the two that are inaccessible for the duration of the construction of the new hotel - I eventually found something like a parking space. It had some scaffolding stored in it, so hopefully no-one was going to be needing that. It was also in a rather inconvenient corner, so I had to exit the car from the passenger side.

What got me really livid about the whole thing was that not anywhere was there a security guard indicating that a parking level was full. In fact the ?we care about your safety? posters were the sole representatives of centre management I saw anywhere.

Now, I'm not expecting Hyde Park Corner to magic more parking bays out of thin air while they're building a hotel, but surely expecting a bit of effort to make the parking experience a little more manageable for those brave or foolish enough to enter the shopping centre is not unreasonable.

Inconvenient, but cough up!

What really got my goat after my husband was collected and the banking was done was that I then had to pay for the privilege of parking in a half-bay shared with a pile of scaffolding. And no one was going to refund me for the 35 minutes I spent searching for this sub-standard parking.

Before anyone tells me that parking garages are now managed by those outsourced parking villains, I'd like to point out that the purpose of outsourcing is not for companies to wash their hands of an aspect of their business, it's for them to leave that aspect up to those best equipped to deal with it. For the customer, the process should still be seamless.

So, when Hyde Park Corner decided to build a hotel that would use up two of their parking levels for the duration of the construction, they should have sat down with their InterPark consultants and said, ?Look, we're about to do this thing, and it's going to inconvenience a lot of people. Let's work out a way to take the sting out of it by offering them a discount on the first hour of parking while it's going on. That will make them feel more well disposed to us.?

A poster at the entrance saying ?Due to construction work, and a limited number of parking bays, finding a parking may take longer than usual. We apologise for the inconvenience, but please refer to our LED boards which will alert you to the areas that are least congested.?

Take on a little inconvenience yourselves

Heaven forbid that Hyde Park Corner should be inconvenienced in any way themselves, by having to spend a little bit of money on making things easier on their customers.

No, instead, somewhere, I'm sure there's a poster saying ?sorry for the inconvenience?, but no further effort has been made to mitigate the circumstances for parkers. No extra staff have been put on the job to direct traffic (never mind to take care of our security while hordes of construction workers access the premises). All in all, it was a shoddy experience of a badly-handled situation, and I won't be going back to Hyde Park Corner until the construction is over. It's not worth the aggravation.

It's a city-wide problem

The rest of Johannesburg could also do with a few lessons in incident management. Perhaps construction trucks could schedule their deliveries for times outside of rush hour, so that when two lanes of traffic are blocked, it doesn't cause a jam that extends for ten blocks.

I'm delighted that men with red flags have been charged with the job of managing traffic when their trucks are turning onto a busy road, but perhaps this could happen mid-morning and mid-afternoon, or before and after-hours, rather than when everyone else is trying to get to their office on time.

And when those grass-cutting guys are set to work on the verges and curbs, I am all for traffic cones and signs being strategically placed to stop cars from running them over, but perhaps the cones could be placed a little more considerately, rather than in the middle of the road, when really, the cutters are only working on the pavement.

Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She's grateful for the shiny new city, really, but she thinks that things could be managed slightly better.

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