Up until now my problems with our super new hospital, the Calderdale Royal, have been finding a parking space before visiting times end, or getting lost in the maize of corridors inside.
But last week I discovered a new hazard. Getting out of the car park in one piece. Regular visitors to the hospital will know that there is now a exit barrier and you need to insert a ticket into the machine at the side of it to escape.
It's a bit of a nightmare because there is only one exit and everyone leaves at the same time. So consequently you get cars coming from every direction trying to join the one queue, and tempers are frayed to say the least .
I was with my mum, and it must have taken us 15 minutes or so to get to the front of the queue. I'd done nothing but moan about the situation and suggested it would help if they staggered visiting times on different wards. And I was still sounding off when I reached out of my window to put my ticket in the machine. It was at that precise moment that I really did have something to complain about. Or rather the 20 strong queue of motorists behind me did.
I'd obviously put my ticket in the wrong way round and in a split second it came back out it and I watched it float to the floor. With bright red face I got out of my car and found to my absolute horror that my ticket wasn't the only one there.Once the barrier lifts, the machine must spit each discarded ticket out. So screaming obscenities that I couldn't possible repeat (of course I forget momentarily who was in the car with me), I gathered about 50 tickets into my hands and stood and looked at the growing queue.
It's at times like this that you want the ground to open up and swallow you. But instead what we tend to do is look at others and somehow expect them to empathise with us or come to our rescue. Not one of the faces looking back at me was about to do either. Two of them looked like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau from the film Grumpy Old Men, another couple reminded me of Blanche and Norris from Coronation Street, and was it my imagination or did the woman bleeping her horn have a look of hot-tempered Naomi Campbell?.
I wanted to assure them (and my mum) that I wasn't mentally deranged and needed locking up, as I fed one ticket after another into the machine hoping against hope that mine would be near the top of the pile and I'd make my getaway before I got lynched.
Number 22 or thereabouts must be my lucky number, and as I jumped in the car and roared away all I could hear was my mother in a very stern voice saying she couldn't believe my language. "If you had just asked God to help you he would have," she told me. If only life was that simple.
I'd like to think that I'm not the only person to have been caught out by this machine, and hope the hospital authorities might take note and do something about it, from a health and litter point of view. My mother almost had a heart attack......