Man left with eye-watering car park charge after '18-year stay'

A man who attempted to pay his car parking ticket was told he owed a sum of money that amounted to an 18-year stay.

The eye-watering sum was shared in a post to the r/MildlyInfuriating Reddit page - and has since gone viral as people try and make sense of the charge.

According to the parking machine, the man trying to pay for his ticket had stayed at the car park for 6,501 days, 13 hours, and 20 minutes.

While it seems unlikely that the man had stopped off at the car park for nearly two decades, the machine makes it clear that "all tickets must be validated at this terminal". This made it a mildly annoying moment to say the least.

The ridiculous sum of £52,016 was requested by the machine - and this isn't the only humorous detail that people spotted.

The machine accepts coins and banknotes of £5, £10, and £20, which some found hilarious. One person wrote in the comments of the post: "It's nice that they give you the option to pay that in coins."

Another joked: "Yeah that's wild. Imagine coming back to your car and finding out you apparently owe a whole house worth of money."

Others were left wondering why such a high charge had been presented and believe they have solved the problem. One person suggested a car in the garage may have been abandoned and the machine tripped out on the next scan.

A comment explained: "Related: at airports, people occasionally abandon a car. Some airports have a process that triggers a check on cars that have been there for months but some don't.

"I've heard stories where they go through a process that involves the city eventually acquiring ownership of the car and auctioning it off."

Another added: "He's paying for parking. What likely happened is someone before him scanned an old ticket, but the machine takes so long to calculate how much they owe, it takes a while to display, often just in time for some unsuspecting person to scan their ticket and see this."

They added: "18 years ago got a ticket at that place, and didn't pay for it. They still have a valid ticket.

"Today, that same person scanned their ticket. It takes the machine so long to calculate and display the total that that person walked away, and the original poster scanned their own ticket while the process was still going on.

"The machine doesn't then abandon the first process, and so eventually OP's charge was the old charge."

It is unclear whether the original poster paid the £52,000 ticket price, but we can only hope they didn't!