Ruth Brandon: Who would be a traffic warden?

Younger readers won't believe this, but once you could drive anywhere and just park. No lines, no meters. Just free.

Most of today's motorists were probably born long after this Edenic time ended in the 1950s. But we somehow still feel parking ought by rights to be free. Petrol, servicing, repairs - these are all inevitable expenses. But we'll do anything not to pay for parking. I remember when pay parking was first introduced in Milton Keynes city centre. MK is built around the car, and everyone was outraged at this shameless milking of trapped customers. Motorists would circle for hours waiting for one of the few remaining free parking spots, in the face of acres of empty pay-space. Eventually, triumphantly, we'd locate a space miles from our destination, probably having paid for the parking several times over in petrol. It was an atavism we couldn't control.

As indeed it still is. Paying for parking, even now that there are more cars than parking spaces, is something we all zealously resist. And parking attendants, charged with the enforcement of this outrage, bear the brunt of our fury. My plumber (white-van men are the parking attendants' especial enemy) thinks they're all natural sadists, a view reinforced by the recent BBC documentary, in which parking attendants, paid by results, were shown relentlessly accumulating scalps in highly dubious circumstances. He hates them, one and all. And he is not alone.

Why, then, would anyone take the accursed job? Partly, of course, because it's easy to get. Sandy is typical. "I don't think anyone starts off saying 'I want to be a parking attendant'," he says. He used to work in retail, then left when his first baby was born because he felt he wasn't seeing anything of her. After a period of unemployment it was hard to find another job; when this came up, he took it. It's been six years now, and he enjoys it. "You walk, you meet people." What about upset drivers? "When you start, you feel, 'everyone hates me'. But most understand."

This philosophical approach is not always easy to maintain, especially in the face of violence. One white-van man threw hot paint over one of Sandy's colleagues, then denied the whole thing. He would have got away with it had not a couple of community wardens happened to witness the incident.

Witnesses are a problem: sometimes a member of the public will leave a name and address, but when you try to follow it up they've moved, or can't be bothered. And difficulties also arise because so many parking attendants speak poor English: perhaps for obvious reasons, this seems to be a job natives avoid. Of the roomful I met, only about two spoke English as a first language. Of course, this is immaterial when handing out tickets, but it doesn't help in an argument. "If you can't talk to someone, they'll note some of your words, then twist what you say and it becomes a big thing."

Sandy and his employers, NCP, are quick to point out that they do not operate the abhorred pay-by-results system. They are paid hourly - £7.40 after training, with bonuses for good behaviour.

So is there really no impetus to ticket rather than leave well alone? No sense of the chase?

Sandy insists that he does not lie in wait for the moment a meter expires - "If you see one due to run out in 10 minutes you do two to three streets, then you come back." If the driver gets there before he's begun to write, he lets them go - "It's not worth the hassle." Nevertheless, the essence of the job is inescapable. "You're walking up and down, maybe it's been half an hour, an hour, since you did a ticket. If you haven't done anything, it's like you're not doing any work... So maybe you've written down your first line - you've started." And once he's begun he can't stop: like Mastermind, that's the rules of the game.

motoring@independent.co.uk