TOM UTLEY: Mrs U's £55 parking fine meant that, for once, SHE looked silly. I paid up - it was cheap at the price for the joy of seeing her blush!
The other day my darling wife, and fellow technophobe, finally joined the brave new world of the smartphone parking app. It was to prove a costly experience.
Until then, something had gone wrong whenever we tried to download the PayByPhone app on her Samsung Galaxy, although – unusually for me – I'd had no such trouble downloading it on my iPhone.
She therefore used to ring me whenever she had the car and needed to pay for parking. She would then tell me the location number of the space she had found, and I would feed it into my own app to pay the fee.
But then, last week, she announced triumphantly that, at last, she had succeeded in downloading the app.
So off she drove, exulting in her newfound independence, to walk the dog in Dulwich Park, where Southwark Council now charges an extortionate £2.70 per hour for using the once-free car park.
An hour later, she was home, seething with rage and clutching in her fist... a parking ticket!
'The flaming app told me I had five minutes left!' she said. (To be brutally honest, 'flaming' was not her precise choice of word, but this is a family newspaper, and she was sorely provoked, poor thing.)
Well, I checked our joint bank account online and, sure enough, a payment of £2.70 had gone out to Southwark Council half an hour before the ticket was issued. So what on earth had she done wrong to incur a £55 fine, rising to more than twice as much if we didn't cough up pronto?
'Um, are you quite sure you put our registration number in the app?' I asked.
'Of course I did! I'm not stupid!' she fumed, and she thrust her PayByPhone app under my nose to prove it.
At first glance, it looked all right. But, oh, dear, wait a minute. Instead of the last three letters of our registration number, she'd absent-mindedly programmed in the last three characters of our postcode.
Perhaps other long-married couples will understand when I say that my irritation over the parking ticket was mixed with a delicious sense that, for once, she was the one who looked silly, and not me.
'Never mind, darling,' I said, as I relished my moment of schadenfreude. 'It could happen to anyone. God, don't I hate modern technology too!'
Indeed, I can't help feeling that life was an awful lot simpler in the days before the smartphone, when there was no danger of making a mistake like hers. You knew where you stood with good old cash, when paying for parking meant feeding sixpences or shillings into a meter. (For the benefit of the young, a sixpence was 2.5p, and a shilling was 5p).
True, you had to have the right change – and many of us kept a stash of coins in the glove compartment for that purpose. But even if we didn't happen to have what we needed, a passer-by would usually be happy to give us change for a half-crown (12.5p) or a ten-shilling note (50p).
I should also admit that coin-in-the-slot meters were often out of action through theft or wanton vandalism, even in those days before so many of our city centres became no-go areas riddled with crime.
But, if so, we could generally get away with parking without charge, simply by sticking a note on the windscreen saying: 'Meter out of order.' Though never noted for their forgiving nature, traffic wardens would usually understand.
Of course, paying electronically for parking – or for anything else – can be much more convenient than using cash, assuming that the technology is working properly and we are careful with how we use it.
But, this week, we were treated to terrifying warnings of just how vulnerable our increasing reliance on electronic technology makes every one of us – and not just the odd absent-minded old lady.
I'm thinking of the catastrophic power cuts in Spain and Portugal, where life as we have come to know it came to an abrupt halt when the electricity supply failed.
Entire transport systems ground to a standstill, hospitals were plunged into darkness, ATMs stopped issuing money, distribution networks for food and goods ceased to function, TV channels went off air and millions couldn't contact anyone to ask what the hell was going on.
Meanwhile, only those with the luck or the foresight to have cash in their wallets were able to buy what they needed for their families.
Yes, I know the blackout has been blamed on Spain's excessive dependence on solar and wind power, which are apparently more vulnerable than old-fashioned methods of generating electricity (and there would surely be a lesson in that for Ed Miliband, if only he were not too deranged to listen).
But just imagine how quickly a hostile foreign power could consign us all to the dark ages of hunger and disease, simply by interfering with the computer programs that govern our electricity supplies for a week or two.
Don't tell me that modern anti-virus systems are too sophisticated to allow such a thing to happen. Just look at the huge harm inflicted this week by hackers – possibly teenagers, it's said – on shops such as M&S and Harrods, causing mayhem by attacking their IT systems.
Indeed, every week we read of more businesses falling victim to cybercrime, while the number of ordinary citizens who suffer a similar fate grows greater all the time.
Now we are told that even everyday household appliances such as high-tech fridges, TVs, smart speakers and video doorbells may be capable of spying on us and harvesting our personal details for nefarious purposes. That's not to mention online retailers, banking apps or payment-card readers.
No wonder so many of my generation and older are deeply wary of shopping with plastic cards or making payments online, feeling much more comfortable with notes and coins.
Yet so many outlets now refuse cash that life is becoming increasingly difficult for those who prefer it. Indeed, it has come to the point where MPs say shops and services may one day have to be forced to accept cash, in order to protect vulnerable people who rely on it.
Meanwhile, members of the cross-party Treasury Committee advise that we might all be wise to keep a store of cash, to see us through future cyberattacks and blackouts.
We of a certain age are well used to being mocked by our young for our technological incompetence and our grave suspicion of the internet. But at the rate we're going, there may soon come a time when they are forced to accept that we've been the smart ones all along.
As for that parking fine, yes, I know we should have challenged it. But I'm ashamed to admit that I just couldn't face the palaver of hanging on the line for an eternity ('Your call is important to us'), before trying to explain my wife's mix-up over the registration number to some bloody-minded official, whose computer would almost certainly say 'No' to my pleas.
So I meekly coughed up that £55 fine, on top of the £2.70 my wife had already paid. Ah, well, it was cheap at the price for the pleasure of seeing her blush.
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