|
The Cincinnati Beacon
System Crash at 3CDC’s Fountain Square Garage
Friday, September 14, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
 Photo courtesy of here.
Why is it that 3CDC’s problems have such a keen way of finding me? This evening, my family decided to go downtown to Benihana for some live-action dinner. My wife, who was driving, parked in the 3CDC garage at Fountain Square. I got out of the garage, grabbed my son’s hand to walk toward the elevators, and two older gentlemen asked for my help. They were holding their parking ticket, and they wanted to know if I had ever parked there before. They wanted me to explain the parking system to them, because they did not understand how to pay! (What would happen if I were not around to explain such things to these poor victims?) But what’s more shocking is what happened when my turn came to leave the garage!
Because I don’t like the extra step involved in dealing with the pay station machines, and then the exit machine, I always pay by credit—at the exit—when leaving that garage. Today was no different. So I pulled with the family to the exit, inserted our ticket, and then my credit card.
The machine said “Unable to Read.”
Now, some may here attempt to insert insults—claiming that my credit card was bad, or something. I know this is false, however, since I paid for dinner with the card, and since I just got paid today. The card is actually a check-card, and I double-checked my balance just a moment ago.
The machine rejected the card (the same one I have always used), so we tried to clean the strip on the back by wiping it on my shirt, trying a second time. The machine rejected the card again. So I hit the help button, and told a voice that I only had one credit card, and that the machine was not letting me use it.
Immediately, a woman came running across the garage. First, she tried wiping my card on her shirt, hoping to clean something from the magnetic strip. It did not work, again. The machine gave us the error message, again: “Unable to Read.”
That’s when the woman started complaining. Nothing offensive—at least not toward me—but just the typical kind of thing any normal employee would do when sick and tired of dealing with the same problem repeatedly.
“We just had people out here to fix these machines,” she said. “The system keeps crashing.”
Wow.
The system keeps crashing.
People wonder why I go off on 3CDC and Fountain Square—especially since the new programming seems a success and brings people downtown. These nay-sayers like to ignore the threat to free-speech the corporatized Square brings, and more significantly they turn a blind eye to 3CDC’s general and continual ineptitude. Any private corporation with the power to so profoundly change the face of our City should be watched, carefully. And while some of what they bring might be nice, that does not excuse them from being held accountable for their problems.
And the Fountain Square project has had a continual series of problems—ever since they failed to meet their construction deadline, which was last October. I’m not even sure they’ll make it for the one year anniversary of the original opening date!
But more significantly, what does it say about 3CDC when they apparently cannot manage even these kinds of minor interfacing details?
The Fountain Square garage leaves old men wandering around in confusion, while frequent system crashes frustrate employees and make exiting the garage difficult.
|