Ok. It's basically unanimous! We'll take on the parking job!
The parking job is located at this skyscraper in the center of town.
Now, before we get started, it's worth a little tangent to talk about Japanese car parking innovations.
Big cities in Japan, especially Tokyo, are extremely limited in space, so there is extremely little street parking. Every square metre of land is precious. However, residents need cars and not every commute is possible by train, so they need to store the cars ‘somewhere’
Enter space efficient parking garages. Often compared to vending machines, these work differently than what you'd commonly think of as a multi story car park.
You simply drive into the elevator. Park, leave, pay an attendant / or machine and your car is whisked off to storage somewhere, usually by being stacked on top of other cars.
There's many different ways this is done. Some are like a carousel, that will spin around until they get the desired car.
And others have more elaborate vending machine like car dispensing systems.
Perhaps one of the most space efficient ideas is the puzzle parking systems.
These work like those sliding puzzle games where there's a gap spot and you need to move all the other pieces around to assemble an image. But instead of an image, they're cars.
Though these are likely computer controlled nowadays, in the past these were operated by an attendant who would electronically move the various platforms around to retrieve the cars, ideally in the shortest path possible to prevent the customer from waiting too long.
Operating one of these things would have been almost like…
...well...
...playing a mini-game…
:
Hey Taro-chan, I’m counting on you today.
:
Please pull your car out of the parking lot as usual.
:
Depending on the number of cars sent out within the time limit I'll pay your part-time job.
:
Which parking lot will you be responsible for? The more difficult the parking lot, the higher the part-time wages.
This works like the cockroach panic game where you can select from increasingly difficult levels, each which will give you a higher return.
The smallest / easiest will give you 2k per car.
The largest gives you 12k per car.
:
The pallet on which the heavy car is placed, be careful, it takes time to move
:
Well then, I'll be counting on you.
The way the game works is the old guy asks you to retrieve a car with a certain number, and you have to slide the various platforms around to get the car to the exit.
Different vehicles have different weight, and therefore are slower to move the platforms. You have a time limit, and the more cars you retrieve, the more money you earn, so you're incentivised to try and map the quickest possible route.
As before, it’s easiest to show how this works with a video. Note, you can actually move a entire row at a time, a feature I realised AFTER I stopped recording.