A major crisis has arisen in the nation’s parking facilities. Installation of fully automated guidance, control and communication/navigation systems has now become so common that the following phenomena are being reported.

At closing times for local bars, theaters and restaurants hundreds of cars begin flashing their headlights and tooting their horns in an attempt to aid their owner to identify them. The resulting confusion is exacerbated by the automatic homing functions that have been recently introduced. Car owners remotely activate the homers and amid the confusion caused by the flashing headlights and horns tooting, cars begin to seek out their owners at the entrances to parking garages.

There are reported cases of several dozen cars charging driverless at each other as their collision avoidance radars slam on the brakes and then gun the engine in an attempt to guide the cars around the resulting driverless traffic jams. Human parking attendants have been injured and many have abandoned their places of employment in fear or disgust. “If the damn cars are so smart, who the hell needs us” one was heard to say, as he dodged nimbly around a tooting, flashing grid lock of empty automobiles.

There are rumors of illegal “commmand-override” devices becoming available on the black market that allow frustrated motorists to gain control of unmanned cars that are in their way and run them off the road. In turn, there are “counter-command-override” (CCO) devices and, of course,CCCO devices can not be far away. The prospect of enabling the cars themselves to override the overrides has public safety authorities in near panic.

Installation of automatic navigation devices, now standard for several years, has resulted in a new wave of car disappearances. It seems that actual car thefts are way down ever since Lo-Jack and similar devices have allowed police to recover stolen cars in minutes.             Cars are now disappearing because of ambiguities in their navigation programs. For example, there are no less than 27 cities named “Columbus” in the United States and even a couple in Canada. There are “Main Streets” in almost all of those cities, as well as “Elm” and other similarly named streets. When owners direct their cars to pick them up at “Elm and Main” in “Columbus”, for example, and neglect to identify the state, they are often faced with the prospect of calling all 27 “Columbuses” and asking the police departments to check at Elm and Main for their cars.

Please stay tuned for further developments, as a fully automated, empty Boeing 747 is now missing because the last flight crew neglected to designate whether it was to fly to Paris, France or Paris, Illinois.