I read in MGG Pillai's website that the Ipoh City Council has bought 200 imported parking meters at the cost of RM6,789,180, or at RM33,945.90 each. Correct me if I'm wrong but a parking meter is that wee box-timer thingamabob on a metal pole wherein you slot coins, no?

Uh-huh, a highly sophisticated piece of electronic equipment, that. For such an astronomical sum of money - 34k for each meter - the technology would have been imported across galactic distances and the material nothing less than Kryptonite.

Let's say on a whim that you fancy placing a parking meter as an objet d'art alongside your garden gnome and toadstool. So you put aside RM400 a month in your piggybank for the purpose. In a little over seven years, you would have saved enough to afford one parking meter for your little home improvement.

Still on the fairy tale track, if Perodua had a value-for-value trade-in scheme, I could uproot one of those meters and exchange it for a Kelisa.

The Ipoh City Council has bought 200 meters for its 4,000 parking bays. That works out to one meter serving 20 bays. Should one go kaput (damage), a motorist may to walk a distance of 40 cars to reach the next parking meter, get his ticket and walk back possibly under the hot sun or in the pouring rain to display the ticket on his car dashboard, then walk again, in the opposite direction perhaps, to the building he wishes to visit.

For a woman motorist with two toddlers and a baby in a pram in tow, well ... remember, never wear stilettos if you anticipate having to park in Ipoh.

It looks to me like the RM6.8 million has indeed been very well-spent. To the city councillors of Ipoh, and the municipal councillors elsewhere like Petaling Jaya, we the taxpayers of Cronesia salute you for implementing these parking meter projects for our ease and convenience.

Thank you too Mr Pillai for bringing this most interesting piece of news to our attention; I trust that no one will write in to say the veteran newsman was pulling an April Fool's joke on us, or that every day is really April 1 in Cronesia.

And we will remember to vote for the Barisan Nasional when election comes around. We want the long-serving coalition to put more such visionary men and women - who always work in the best interests of the rakyat - on the council boards across the country. We're a thankful and grateful lot, that we are.