One of the most painful elements of living in Australia has been summarised in one spectacularly confusing photo.
The “triggering” image highlighted the battle drivers routinely faced across the country when trying to find somewhere suitable to park their car.
Often what confronted them was a confusing collation of arrows, times, letters and days of the week – as was the case recently for Melbourne driver Mark Serrels.
“Dunno if this sh*t is the worst thing about living in Australia, but it’s definitely in the top five,” he captioned a photo of a roadside sign he shared to Twitter on Tuesday.
The sign featured five different sets of parking rules for one section of parking, with the right of the sign being metered while the left wasn’t.
On the left, there were different rules for between Monday and Friday, Saturday, and again for Sunday.
This sign has highlighted ‘worst thing about living in Australia’. Picture: Twitter
It was to be used only as a 15 minute loading zone between 7.30am and 7.30pm from Monday to Friday, but on Saturday could be used by anyone during the same hours for 30 minutes.
On Sunday, cars could be parked for up to an hour between 7.30am and 6.30pm – the same rule that applied to the bay to the right of the sign.
On every other day of the week however, the bay to the right was metered, having two different rules for between Monday and Saturday.
Between 7.30am and 6.30pm, the spot was metered for half an hour, before being metered for two hours between 6.30pm and 8.30pm.
Drivers familiar with such scenes shared in Mr Serrels’ confusion, sharing times they too had been bamboozled by overly technical parking signs.
“It’s such a nightmare too because it’s difficult to stop and not hold up traffic to figure it out, and if you do happen to mess it up the fine isn’t exactly cheap,” one reply read.
This one was also slammed by drivers. Picture: Twitter
“I love that, to top it all off, they whack an easypark sign on there but it’s such a shoehorned solution that the app asks you to enter a postcode and you’re expected to know that’s where you cram the weird parking designation numbers. Stupid stupid stupid,” another said.
Someone else shared a photo of a sign they thought was “actually worse”.
The sign was ticketed for one hour Monday to Friday between 8am and 6pm and simultaneously ticketed for two hours Monday to Friday between 6am and 8pm.
On Saturday it was ticketed for two hours between 8am and 8pm.
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“This one gets more cooked the longer you look at it,” Mr Serrels said.
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