I was reminded of this when I read a “Shower thoughts” post about clocks.

Where I live, there usually is free parking outside of stores and malls, but limited to a short time, such as 15 minutes or a couple of hours. People have parking discs that they rotate to show when they arrived, and put the discs up visible behind their windshields in their cars.

I have an automatic parking timer displayed in my windshield, that shows the time when I parked rounded up to the nearest half/whole hour. It’s a ”set and forget” thing, which auto adjusts to daylight savings. However, it speeds up 1 - 2 minutes a week, which I didn’t see as it rounds up the time, but I found out after a few months.

Once after parking, I took a quick dash into the store, took maybe 5 minutes. When I got back I had received a fine for the equivalent of 80 € for ”parking for 23 hours in a 2 hour spot”. They apparently don’t have to wait five minutes to write out the ticket if the parking timer was so off.

I didn’t contest the ticket, I considered it a learning experience and a reminder to never blindly trust technology.