You’re meeting a friend for coffee at one of Main Avenue’s many fine spots for a mid-day break. You go to use your new card for the parking meter the city started offering recently.

It doesn’t work. No matter how many times you insert it and re-insert it, the meter tells you to do it again or that it can’t read it. About to tear your hair out, you put as many quarters as you have handy into it and pray that’s enough.

Your good-guy impulse to own the card so you won’t ever be without parking fare has gone to the dogs, to say nothing of your good humor. But after much trial and error and help from a friend – who admits he went to the transit center twice for training – I finally figured it out.

Slide the card with the gold square facing forward as far as you can into the meter and leave it there. It will tell you you must purchase $1 worth of time (at 75 cents an hour, up from 60 cents last year). Press the OK button. If you’re staying longer, press the up arrow to the amount that corresponds with the proper time.

Voila, you are a parking genius. But that’s only on Main. Say you want to meet friends for a drink at Eno Wine Bar on Second Avenue. The parking meters there work completely differently.

This time you have to slide the card in and rather than a dollar amount, you’re confronted with a sign for a 20 minute interval (if your card is actually working, that is.) Then you need to pull the card out and push it in several times until you arrive at the amount of time you want, similar to the way you used to use the key the city provided for meters.

And after all that, pay close attention to your watch, because not only has the cost of parking gone up, the cost of parking tickets, has too, from $9 to $12.