Trade a chicken for a parking space

Editor,

I just want to applaud Friday’s cartoon about the UNM Parking Daleks. As a side note, I applaud The Daily Lobo for getting a cartoonist that addresses UNM issues, not more syndicated pap.

These parking kiosks might be convenient for Parking and Transportation Services (an independent, non-University profit vendor) but they suck for us.

As a staff person who mainly walks or bikes to work, as is “encouraged” by the administration, it really galls me that for the three or four days a semester I must use a car and find parking on campus, I am now forced to find parking around campus that still accepts cash. Good luck there!

The parking garages and meter spaces on campus recently went cashless, and it is completely discriminatory.

I do not use credit cards; I have a debit card but use it only at a credit union cash machines because of my (completely founded) distrust of machines that are supposed to deduct an agreed amount from your bank but often put a hold on your money over and above the amount agreed upon in the transaction.

And with recent scandals involving information stolen through illegal keypad technologies placed by thieving rings at major retail outlets, all the more reason to go cash-only! I’m not even going to go into the issues of privacy/spyware technology; my tinfoil helmet would go spinning.

City street parking in areas such as Nob Hill use meter kiosks that take both cash and plastic. Would PATS have been that financially inconvenienced by using a comparable system? Or is it the overhead reduced even more by eliminating jobs — jobs that entail humans accounting for cash from said machines?

I used to be proud of UNM … when it was an academic institution, but now UNM is a for-profit corporation, just like Wal-Mart … despite what Schmidly claims.

I encourage visitors, staff, faculty and students to shun the cashless parking daleks, or, if you must use them, try the barter system.

What would one of the subhuman enforcers do if they found a plate of muffins or a live chicken attached to one of those machines as “trade” for a parking space? I may just have to test that!

Glinda Wyndorf
UNM staff