Let me out!

I was at St. Joe's today for the clinics LDI Day 2.

As always there was a line of cars waiting to get out of the parking ramp.  Each car had to stop at the payment station, enter their parking ticket, then their payment, then wait for the receipt to print, the arm to raise and then they could leave.

  After waiting in the downward spiral I finally got my turn at leaving.

I drove up to the payment station and inserted my ramp ticket.

The ticket was spit out and the following message appeared on the screen.

Are you kidding me?!  What in the world does that message mean?

I pushed the call button to tell the operator what was going on....after all, I work for HealthEast and had a parking voucher, I am sure that the operator can just raise the arm and let me out. Right?!

WRONG!

I pushed the button and nothing happened.  NONE of the buttons worked and now when I tried to put my ticket in the machine it wouldn't even attempt to take it.  I quickly called the HealthEast operator to see if she could get me out. She claimed that she would need to call the engineer to come and let us out and it could take a few minutes depending on where he was in the hospital.

It took about 5 minutes before he arrived but with a line of cars about 20+ long, it felt more like an hour.  A couple of nice gentlemen got out of their cars and walked to my car to see if I needed assistance because I obviously didn't know what I was doing and we needed to get traffic moving.  When he was able to see for himself that it was a machine malfuntion he decided to try to lift the stop-arm that was the only thing standing between me and freedom.  :-(  he couldn't lift it

The engineer finally came to raise the arm and let us out.  Whew!  Now, off to spend the next 45 minutes fighting traffic to get home to my family...