The situation in Westfield’s car park turned toxic last week when shoppers were receiving car park tickets that were out by 10 minutes. CWWPA reported this situation to Westfield some four months ago. At the time they said that everything was ‘honkydory’. They claimed their computers used ‘Standard Time’. At that time (in December) the machine was some 5 minutes out.
A good example of what was happening was: you arrive at the carpark (by your phone’s time) of 6:01 PM. The ticket was being imprinted with a time stamp of 5:56.PM. Trouble was, when you left (expecting to have your free entry after 6PM, you could be faced with paying an unexpected parking fee. This week, both the North Shore Times and radio station 2UE took up the story.
Later this morning, I had a call from the Customer Services Manager at Westfield. He acknowledged that there had been a problem. The story now is that their carpark computers are not connected to the Internet (and hence cannot access world time clock). To make matters worse, the batteries in the computers had gone flat. That is why the clock was running slow. (Believe it or not).
The manager assured me that they have changed the batteries and that everything has been fixed.
Let’s hope so.
I will be keeping a close eye on things.
Chatswood West Ward History 