The car park attendant

A friend sent me this story in an e-mail.

Outside Bristol Zoo there is a car park for 150 cars and 8 coaches.

There also used to be a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars £1 and coaches £5. This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years , then one day just didn't turn up for work...

"Ho hum", said Bristol Zoo Management - "better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant" ......

"Err no", said the Council, "that car park is your responsibility" ...

"Err no", said Bristol Zoo Management, "the attendant was employed by the City Council, wasn't he?" .....

"Err NO!"

So, sitting in his villa in Spain is a bloke who has been taking daily the car park fees amounting to an estimated £400 per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years.... Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to 3 million six hundred & forty thousand pounds!!!!!!

My immediate reaction was 'Bloody Hell - a pound of that was mine' . But I thought at the time 'What cheap parking it is' and hey, good luck to the bloke says I, he's shown more initiative and luck than many of our captains of industry who end up costing us a lot more and earning more than this chap did. At least he put in his hours for it!

It also reminded me of two Council auditors I knew who sat in a car on Southport promenade watching the car park attendant from a distance to make sure he gave everyone a ticket and wasn't pocketing some of the entry money. (He was - about a tenner a day until they caught him). Anyway, these two blokes were happily sitting in their car all day until a bus drew up alongside and the driver leaned out and shouted "You dirty buggers - why don't you go somewhere private!" He'd obviously passed them a few times on his route during the day and his homophobia had got the better of his common sense!!