Picture the scene. I arrive last Sunday to participate in a sporting event. I park my car in a public car park next to the venue, a landscape of hills and woods. I sign on, warm up and spend the next hour or so plugging through the mud over hill and dale on my bike. I return to my car with the warm glow of satisfaction (well absolutely cream-crackered if you must know) to find - you've guessed it - a parking ticket. I look around and kick myself for not noticing the tiny, faded, well hidden signs warning me that this was a "pay and display" site. But hey, you make mistakes, I wasn't going to let that spoil my mood, nor the fact that the parking charge was effective on a Sunday. Look, the kind parking operators would give me a 50% discount on the penalty charge if I paid quickly. I reached for my smartphone and looked for the inevitable URL or QR code to pay... but found none, just a message advising me to send payment with the tear-off slip to the parking operator accompanied by a cheque or - wait for it - postal order - by post!

I've helped build services that enables pain free transfers within milliseconds between any UK bank accounts, defined business models to make this work in any retail situation and here I am confronted with the need to find my cheque book (i cant' remember when I last used it). Somebody had found a way of giving me a very specific kind of punishment, a kind of room 101!  I looked on the website of the German multi-national parking operator to see if I had any other options to pay, but no luck. All it said was that their business is founded on "three pillars", the first of which (and I kid you not) is "The use of state of the art technology". Come on!

Work to be done.