We turn into Royal College street and hear a shout of 'Oi!'.
It's a builder. He marches up to us, legs bowed, feet pointing outwards. Here we go, I think, another one complaining about being given a bloody ticket.
"One of your wardens just head-butted me and punched me in the face," he says.
His skin is flinty and pale, the colour of plaster-dust and he's so drenched in sweat that his hair has been swept back into curved, black spikes.
"He was giving a ticket on the lorry and I said 'come on mate, don't be out of order'. And then he nutted me."
"He nutted you?" I say.
"Now, why would he want to do that?" says John in his resonant Nigerian accent.
"You better tell him, if I see again, I'm going to knock him out. I'm not being funny, mate, if he didn't have a uniform on him, I'd have smacked him up."
"What difference does the uniform make?" I say.
"Do I look stupid? It's like hitting a copper isn't it? Plus he's black as well."
"What difference does that make?"
"It makes all the difference, mate. I know how it fucking works."
I notice that the builder doesn't have an emerging lump or any red impact marks on his face, as you might expect if a PA had, just moments ago, launched their skull at it at top velocity. So I decide to tell a lie.
"Don't worry," I say. "We've got CCTV all around here".
There's a silence.
"Yeah," he says . "It didn't happen here. It happened round the corner."
"Round the corner?" I say. "Yeah, we've got loads of CCTV round the corner."
"There'll have to be a police investigation," says John.
The builder scratches the back of his neck and looks away.
"Well," he says, "that's up to you. But it's just going to work worse for your mate, innit?"
John starts eyeing the scaffolding lorry behind him. "In the meantime," he says, "how long did you say you've been parked here?"
***
The day before I started, to get an idea of some of the more common complaints made against them, I visited an off-license in Soho's Old Compton Street who often stick anti-warden news-stories to the front of their shop.
"They're not properly trained," proprietor Vince told me. "They're supposed to attach the tickets to the car, but they don't."
"What do they do with them?" I asked.
"They stick them under their hats and send them off later. And they have targets. Like, if you get so many tickets you get the chance to win a car."
"So what's the solution?" I asked.
"Shoot them all with a crossbow."
Like Vince, much of the country seem to fantasise about taking medieval weaponry to PAs. It must be the only thing, bar the day's date, that our newspapers have ever reached consensus on. That godhead for the Kingdom's thicks, Jeremy Clarkson, has opined in The Sun that it's illegal to set wardens on fire. The Evening Standard call them "the lowest of the low". Even The Guardian, recently ran a piece attacking the fact that tickets are issued in "broad daylight" by "incoherent officials" who "turn a blind eye to crime or antisocial behaviour other than illegal parking".
The absolute bullseye of rage, though, revolves around the issue of bonuses being issued to hyperactive ticketers. Two years ago, NCP's Westminster operation were compelled to stop a 'Champions League' system that involved financial rewards, after the Evening Standard made glorious uproar on the matter.
For an expert view on the controversy, I called Paul Pearson, who runs free appeal service parkingticket.co.uk.
"Camden are one of the worst," Paul told me. "They see it as rich pickings. When their PA's get back, the first thing they're asked is 'how many did you do'? There's a tremendous pressure, and if they don't issue enough tickets, they're fired. At the moment, 464,000 tickets a year must be issued or NPC face a fine."
Considering all this, it should come as no surprise that, in a recent survey of the nation's most hated professions, PA's came seventh. That's one above journalists. So, on my first day, as I clip on my bottle green tie, I become, in terms of favour with the British public, roughly the human equivalent of a maggot putting on a wasp costume. Luckily, however, I won't be alone. I'll be accompanied by supervisor John Akhigbe, a veteran of eight years service, who boasts on once issuing a ticket to Sven Goran Erikson in front of a baying pack of paparazzi.
We step out of the HQ - a horrible east-German-esque fortress - into the hottest day in a hundred years. The sun is so bright it's blanching out all the colours and the air smells of exhaust fumes, deep-fat fryers and toasting ozone. As our shift progresses, I start to get an idea why PAs are unpopular. First, we issue a PCN to a Camden council minibus for the infirm, then to a work van that had its back wheel just edged into a disabled bay.
Later, we see a van with a note on its dash saying, 'EMERGENCY GAS CALL'. It's in a residents-only space. We wait five minutes and when the driver doesn't return, John commences the procedure. Suddenly, we hear footsteps behind us and -
"Wo! Wo! I'm on a gas leak, yeah? That bloke's going to blow up in a minute!"
The gasman looks at me and says, "Are you his supervisor?"
I shake my head solemnly and point to his biro-crafted sign.
"That's not an official document, is it, sir?" I say.
"Yes it is!"
John peers at the scrap of paper and, after a moment carefully considering it, shakes his head.
"That is not an official document."
"You don't know your laws, do ya? There's a rule that goes back 200 years."
"200 years?" says John.
"You know?" says the gas-man, "200 years? When God was a little boy? It says you can park here doing emergency gas work."
He climbs into his cab and prepares to move it to a pay and display bay.
"I've paid for this road!," he yelps out of the window. "I've paid fucking tax! Plus, there's a bloody loophole. You check it out. And next week, get a fucking proper job!"
All day John sticks to the letter of the law. This works against most people, but in the favour of some. One van was on slightly worn yellow lines. This was 'incorrect street furniture' and John didn't issue. Another car's huge back end was completely obstructing a pavement but, the driver angrily insisted, as its back wheel was on 'private property', it was fine.
I, meanwhile, have been submerged in a claustrophobic and acutely fretful version of reality. The streets have hummed with hostility. I've become a connoisseur of the evil look. There are as many different types of death-stare as there are faces. They come at you constantly and from every direction. And then there's the shouting. Sometimes it's just smears of sound from a moving vehicle. More often, you can hear it properly. The most vulnerable moments come during the process of issuing PCNs. Passers-by, swollen with solidarity on behalf of the victim, rage at close range and take pictures with camera-phones. This morning's best abuse has been, "Sad miserable fucking robot idiot cunts. You guys work for fucking Hitler."
After lunch back at HQ, Norma - the cup-of-tea wielding mother-hen of the office - is just telling me about the time she ticketed Abu Hamza, when John emerges from the recreation room to fetch me. We leave, his friends calling out, 'See you later, Nigeria', to his, 'ok, Mumbai'.
"It's friendly banter," he explains. "We name people from where they come from originally. Like I'm calling that guy Mumbai and there's Ghana and Somalia..."
Which makes me 'Royal Tunbridge Wells'. I decide to keep that quiet as we turn into a main road. Above my head are banners on lampposts that say 'Kilburn High Road - The Closer You Look, The Better It Gets'. I do as it says and look closer. I see an empty drugs wrap made from a 'Now' magazine cover and a bee drowning in a McDonalds sauce pot.
We turn into side street called Messina Avenue and find the Observer's photographer, who's gone ahead of us, being harangued by lady wearing an 'I heart Kilburn' badge.
"We get these foreigners in to do these jobs and all they do is hassle law abiding citizens," she's telling him, motioning at John.
"But what about all the abuse we get?" I ask. "Don't you feel sorry for us?"
"Can I help you?" she says, before turning back to the photographer and saying, "I don't know how you found a white one."
I walk to where John is logging a motorbike without a Pay and Display ticket.
"Do you often get racist abuse?" I ask him.
"Every day. It's the worst thing about the job."
"But that lady there - she's Asian," I say.
"Asians give us racist abuse as well. Last week, one said to me, 'you black bastard, go back to your home'. I was speechless. And the black people don't like us doing this work. They say, 'The white men, they sit in their office and drink coffee and tell us black men to do their dirty job for them.'"
Indeed, I'm later to discover first-hand that people of all colours are at it. When I tell a black man he can't park in a loading bay whilst he eats in 'Speedy Noodle', he barks, "it's a black and white thing, isn't it?"
Eventually, we head back to the office to meet John's boss, NCP's Contract Manager Emma Collins. Sitting in her small office, she tells me about some of the most recent cases of abuse they've had. Last week a PA was beaten and left unconscious. There was so much blood that they thought he'd been run over. Another was chased with a hammer. He told Emma, "this is not why I left Rwanda."
I ask Emma about the widely-held belief that there's an incentive scheme. She flatly denies it. Which makes me wonder - if PAs aren't paid according to PCNs issued, how do NCP protect themselves against three-hour fag breaks?
Emma says, "There is a lot of trust in it," and, for a moment, I think 'aaah, that's nice. A corporation of the type that has letters for a name relying on simple trust.' Then, she continues, "They have to log on their handsets whenever they change street, also they carry their pocket book in which they have to log their location every three minutes. There are also supervisors that control the streets and the council also has compliance officers in plain clothes who check on things".
Later, when I ask John the same question, he taps his handset and says "GPRS - satellite tracking".
As we're talking, there's a 'code red' - an incident that's turned violent. We find 43 year old Awu Olatundun-Busari sitting in a quiet room, shaking. She's just had a dog set on her. There are paw marks on her chest and it bit her leg. She's not sure, yet, whether it broke the skin.
"What kind of dog was it?" I ask.
"A very big dog. With big mouth. I am so frightened."
Indeed, she looks terrified - and close to tears.
That evening, I don't know what to think. I've no doubt people like John are treated in an terrible manner. But are there good reasons as to why the rage exists in the first place? To help untangle the moral muddle, I call Dr James Garvey, a professional philosopher and tell him about the gas man we moved along, the van with its back wheel in the disabled bay...
"These cases seem annoying," he says, "because they involve people being punished for not doing any harm. Jeremy Bentham said the point of the law was to have good effects which bring about a greater balance of pleasure over pain."
"But John was just doing his job," I tell him.
"Well, take gas leak incident," he says. "You can rank your values in any way you like, but a person that ranks their job as more important than human life needs an ethics primer."
"Ok," I say. "Are their any philosophical traditions that would permit setting a dog on someone?"
"God, I don't know... Nietzsche?" he says. "But the dog thing did make me think about Hobbes. He says we make laws because ungoverned human beings are a nightmare. If we were left to our own devices we'd be filled with fear, living in a state of war, everyone against everyone. So we form laws for mutual protection. But this is the kicker. He says that covenants without the sword are but words. Well, traffic wardens are the swords. If we were all perfectly rational, we'd just be nice all the time and park rationally. But it's because we're bastards and do things like set dogs on people that we need things like traffic wardens."
I wonder if the argument that, as some claim, these 'swords' are actually cash registers complicates matters.
"Well, if a council is using laws simply to make money," he says, "that's a breach of trust in you. In a circumstance like that, if you're a social contract theorist like, Rousseau or Locke, you get to storm things, you get to over-throw the council".
"So what's the answer?"
"People ought to recognise the Hobbsian point that there would be no need for traffic wardens if human nature wasn't quite as dark as it is, and traffic wardens might cause a little less harm if they recognised that sometimes things explode."
***
It's partly that, I think, and it's partly that some drivers simply don't like parking properly. The overwhelming majority of the time, John's expectations have been completely reasonable, and yet the abuse has been foul and plentiful. But there'll always be a problem with a certain kind of car-owner, those ones that suffer from a middle-class blind-spot which says that they're simply and automatically above the 'criminal' classes. They're superior stock, law-makers, not law-breakers. Happy to demand zero tolerance for every other crime, they'll become incensed that there's even a mechanism for catching them at their little infractions, be they PAs or speed cameras. You can read their letters in local papers, and you can picture them, plum-faced with rage. And what they're actually angry about is 'the impertinence of the little man'. It's these types who'll become outraged at reports of attacks against police officers but will allow a chuckle when a warden is assaulted. It's a dirty little hypocrisy, and its endemic.
And the legal system doesn't appear to be helping matters much. When they called the police about the woman who'd been attacked by the dog, NCP were told that they 'didn't deal with dogs' and should call the council. As for the judiciary, in January, a Yorkshire woman who deliberately ran over a warden's foot was ordered to attend anger management classes. In the same month, a Bristolian twice drove into a female warden's leg, breaking it. He received a small fine and a suspended sentence. A Cork man who attacked a PA with a hammer in July, fracturing his eye socket, also escaped prison and got fined. Someone should let Jeremy Clarkson know - if we wants to set a PA on fire, he'd be able to afford it easily. And, let's be honest, nobody would mind very much.
***
"That's when I saw him," Emma says. "He wouldn't let him go."
Shortly after our chat, the builder phoned to say he didn't want to cause any trouble after all - and he definitely didn't want the police to investigate.
Before I leave, I have another sit-down with Emma and put Paul Pearson's charge, that NCP will be fined if they don't issue enough tickets, to her. She is unequivocal.
"There is no clause in our contract with Camden that says they can charge us for lack of PCNs", she says. "My contract is quality based. They judge me on training, on keeping errors below 4%, on complaints upheld. So it's not in my interest for my staff to issue dodgy tickets."
This is later confirmed independently by Camden council, who say, "This is not true. We do not have any kind of target agreement that says 'you must issue X number of tickets otherwise you will be financially penalised'."
One issue that'll remain unresolved, though, is in not allowing PA's to use discretion. Emma's response to this is compelling.
"There has to be rigidity in order to protect them from abuse," she says. "If people think a PA can just turn it over then all you're doing is opening them up to more of it."
A point of view that any good Hobbsian would surely sympathise with. But it's one that will be academic anyway, when the satellites take over. Two English local authorities are currently in talks with Partem Limited, a Cheltenham-based company, about their 'Volis' system, which involves sensors in the road that send a message out to space when covered by a car - which is then photographed and logged by a nearby camera. The first the motorist will know about his or her infringement will be the fine that turns up on the doormat. An absolute zero-tolerance situation.
"The problem with systems like this is that sometimes you have legitimate cause to stop, and that's not always clear from pictures or satellites," Edmund King, director of the RAC Foundation, tells me. "I'm afraid that by becoming too computer driven you cut out human flexibility."
All of which makes you wonder, when the real parking robots arrive, will Britain's drivers miss having a human to take their fury out on?
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Words copyright 2005-2010 Will Storr
