Mobile = Flakey
To paraphrase an old joke, working in the mobile space is like being in a bowl of granola, what ain’t plain nuts is flakes.
We are blessed in Edinburgh with a very severe city-centre parking regime, the only redeeming feature of which is the ability to use mpark to pay instead of grubby coins. When it works, of course. I tend to carry even less change now that I can charge to my credit card via a quick call. (BTW, if the guys at mpark are listening, how about putting in place a decent downloadable app instead of the phone call?).
Except that from time to time the service goes does, always as we’re rushing to my daughter’s swimming lesson or something similar. I rock up, press the yellow button on the parking machine and select mpark from my address book. Cool stuff, but two weeks ago it said “Sorry, the service is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.”
This weekend the service is back up, but on connection the parking machine never responded to the call, while mpark was convinced that it was locked into handling a task for someone else. I’m guessing the parking machine’s internet connection had gone down, but that’s no comfort as I desperately tried to scrape together enough change to pay for an hour’s parking.
Would that be acceptable in any space other than mobile telephony?
