Legal parking: Where I work, the parking rate is at 30 SEK an hour. Five days a week, 10 hours a day gives 78 000 SEK a year. Red days and vacation is compensated by overtime. A couple of nights a week I park the car on the evening, maybe for 4 hours in average and at an average cost of 15 SEK an hour. That’s another 6 240 SEK a year. Two to three times a month I park the car overnight, about 10 hours each time and an average cost of 10 SEK something. Add 2 400 SEK a year. Yearly cost: 85 640 SEK a year.

Illegal parking: In average, I get maybe 4 parking tickets a month. Most of them are for 425 or 450 SEK. Some are for 700 SEK. A few are for 300 SEK or 1000 SEK. Let’s say the average is about 500 SEK. That makes 24 000 SEK a year.

The system is broken.

/P

I’m off to Australia. When me and the Jennyral got to the airport, with 15 minutes to check-in deadline, the check-in clerk told us we needed a visa. To Australia. Even though we’re Swedish. I thought nobody required visa for Swedes. I saw the 30 grand SEK we paid for the ticket get wings and fly off. He stood there smiling and looked at us for a few seconds, before he finally mentioned that we could get visas over at the ticketing desk. Why didn’t he say that right away!? We got the visas, and now we’re in Australia.

My laptop broke, so I had to get a new one. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, having no juridical presence in Australia, but I finally persuaded some company into renting me one. Internet at the hotel is $5 an hour or $12 for six hours. There’s no idle timeout, so if I fall asleep those six hours will be gone after six hours. After sleeping away a couple of six hour tickets, I negotiated a deal with the hotel and bought six one-hour ticket for $12. Now I will at least sleep away no more than 55 minutes each time.

I got a parking ticket yesterday. That means I’ve now got parking tickets from Australia, Germany, Austria, USA, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Thailand, Indonesia and Holland.

/P