Man checks parking ticket and is floored by how much he's been charged

A motorist attempting to settle his car parking fee was stunned to discover he supposedly owed enough money for an 18-year stay. The staggering amount was posted on the r/MildlyInfuriating Reddit page - and has since become a viral sensation as users struggle to comprehend the charge.

The parking machine claimed the driver had remained in the car park for 6,501 days, 13 hours, and 20 minutes. Whilst it appears improbable that the chap had parked at the facility for nearly two decades, the terminal insisted "all tickets must be validated at this terminal" - creating a rather confusing situation.

The absurd total of £52,016 was demanded by the machine – but this wasn't the sole amusing detail that observers noticed. The terminal accepts coins and notes of £5, £10, and £20, which some found utterly comical.

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One commenter wrote: "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 pondered why such an enormous fee had appeared – and reckon they've cracked the mystery.

One user suggested an abandoned vehicle in the garage may have caused the machine to malfunction on the subsequent scan.

One person 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 continued: "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 remains a mystery whether the original poster coughed up the whopping £52,000 ticket price, but we can only hope they didn't!