The ticket machine on Level B2 had a laminated sheet taped over its screen, yellowed at the corners, held on with the kind of parcel tape that leaves residue for years. It hadn't been there when I started the job in March. By the second week of April it was, and nobody would tell me who put it up.
I worked nights on the barrier desk at Cathcart Street, four till midnight, mostly waving through late shoppers and the odd taxi doing a shift change. The sheet had eleven rules typed in Arial, numbered, no heading. I read it once out of boredom. Then I read it every night after, because somewhere around rule six something in me went quiet and wanted to keep going.
Do not raise the barrier for a car you have not seen arrive on the ramp camera.
If the barrier raises on its own, log the time and do not go down to check which bay.
The camera on B2 loses signal for exactly forty seconds around 11pm most nights. This is normal and has been reported to building management three times.
If you hear an engine idling on B2 after the camera cuts out, do not radio down. Wait for the picture to come back.
When the picture comes back, count the cars in bay rows A through D against the ticket log. If the numbers match, you're fine.
If there is one more car than tickets sold, do not go looking for the driver. They will find the exit themselves.
Sometimes the extra car is gone by the time you check again. Sometimes it stays until the morning shift comes on. Either way, don't mention it to the day staff, they'll only ask you to fill out a form.
If the barrier arm is down and something is leaning against it from the inside, it will lift on its own within a minute or two. Let it.
Do not look at the number plate on the extra car. If you already have, you'll notice it doesn't stay the same number twice.
If you're on the desk after the fortieth second and the engine hasn't idled but the barrier's already up, that's the one time you go down, because it means it's not on B2 anymore.
Whatever you find at the top of the ramp, walk it back down to B2 slowly and don't run the last bit even if you want to.
That's where the sheet ended, halfway down the page. The rest blank. My supervisor Denny reckoned somebody from facilities wrote it as a wind-up for the new starters, and maybe he's right, I never asked facilities.
I followed it for six months and never had to test past rule nine. Then in October the picture came back at 11:04 and the barrier was already up, arm flat against the ceiling, and I hadn't heard an engine at all. Not idling, not starting, nothing.
I took the stairs instead of the lift, because the lift only goes to B1, always has, some fault with the wiring nobody's fixed since the building went up. The ramp smelled of the diesel that always sits in that stairwell. Nothing new there. At the top, where the ramp meets the street shutter, the shutter was still down and locked the way I'd left it at four.
Against the shutter, facing it, engine off, sat a car I didn't recognise from any resident's permit. Its headlights were on, full beam, throwing two flat discs of light onto corrugated steel that had nowhere to go.
The driver's seat was empty.
The engine was cold when I finally put my hand on the bonnet. Cold the way it is after hours, not minutes.
I walked it back down to B2 slowly, the way rule eleven said, and logged the time, and left the headlights on, because nothing in the eleven rules told me what to do about that.