Parking surrounded by myths and legends

STONEHENGE, Katmandu and Loch Ness in my opinion have always had something in common with the Palma Pay and Display parking system. They’re all surrounded in legends and myths.
Many years ago I once heard tell of a nifty way to pay a parking fine as and when you might get one in Palma, but until this week I had never had the opportunity to see if it works, or even exists. So it was with mixed feelings that La Gidg and I returned to my car parked on Las Ramblas, a good 30 minutes passed the displayed time on the ticket. I’ve often got away with it before now, the luck of the expat perhaps.
However today was not going to be my day, and so there it was, a parking ticket for 60€! Ouch, with the sweetener that if you pay within 14 days you ‘only’ pay 30€. But hang on! What is this little envelope tucked under my windscreen wiper along with the hated fine? Finally I was about to put into action the stories I’d long heard about ‘posting money into the ticket machine.’ When I should have been annoyed with myself for getting a ticket I was in fact rather excited to see if the system really worked.
This is how it goes if you haven’t come across it yourself. You can only do this if you have already paid for a parking ticket, but you’ve come back to your car late. You take that Pay and Display ticket, your parking fine and the little envelope (all modelled by La Gidg in our photo ‘on the go’) and go to the Pay and Display ticket machine. You press the yellow button on the machine and then up pops a ‘Cancellation’ sign. You then have to pay 6€ into the machine and press the blue button and it prints off a receipt for you.
Then (and this is the best bit) you fold all of the papers up together and post them into a slot in the machine! It seems such a simple and benign way to get out of a fine, surely it can’t have been invented by the Spanish authorities?
Gidg looked on, completely baffled, whilst I squealed my way through the process. Now the only thing is that I cannot prove that I ever paid the ticket…. hmm… I knew the plan couldn’t be perfect. Now do I wait to see if I still get a fine, or will that be it? The legend continues. www.mallorcamatters.com