I cant believe I just ate.....

[wolf]

Originally Posted by BigV

Count yourself lucky on this score.

My mom recently fell and went to the emergency room. The doctors decided to keep her overnight. I stayed with her, naturally. When I emerged from the hospital the next morning, I found a $60 parking ticket on the car. Where it was acceptable to park at 9 pm, it was ... expensive to park at 9 am. At least mom's ok.

Yeouch!

I have a couple of not quite legal places that I park (the area out back by the HR office, for example) and only use the parking garage when I absolutely have to. Even were I to pay for it, it's only $5, free if you're in there for less than an hour, which is never the case for me. One of the mysterious parts to the hospital parking situation is that while the self-park garage is $5, valet parking is $3.50 ... free if you're bringing a patient to the ER, because there is construction going on, so the ER spaces are no longer available as they are all reserved for ambulances, since they lost about half of their parking to the construction. The ER, though, is doing better than the radiation oncology center, which lost all of it's parking and their entire building. They're operating out of a series of trailers, as far as I can tell. This is a "city" hospital I'm going to, but one of the more suburban of the city hospitals, in terms of setting and feel. The real City Hospitals charge $10 an hour for parking, so I count myself lucky here.