All the Rage

4: Clamping rage What is it? You've been running out all day to stick money in the meter and reckon all is well until 6 p.m. Wrong. When you get to the car you realise you have miscalculated - and within a minute of the meter running out a team of highly skilled clampers, trained to lie in wait for people like you, has fastened another yellow wheel lock on your car.

They are just sticking that alarming "Stop, Do Not Attempt to Remove!" sticker on the window when you arrive, panting, with only five minutes to collect your child from the crèche/pick up the dry-cleaning/drive your sick grandmother to hospital. For the third time this week you shell out €80 for the crime of being a bit forgetful. Clampers? More like Black and Tans.

The symptoms? They range from mumbling obscenities about where you would like to stick the banana-coloured trap to taking more drastic action. The worst reported case of clamping rage came from Finbar Onuke, a taxi-driver who two years ago emerged from the dental hospital in Dublin, where he was having a tooth extracted, to find his car double-clamped. Helped by a passing pedestrian, he removed one clamp and tried to drive off with part of the other one still attached. He was fined more than €2,000 for his trouble. Clamping rage doesn't pay.

The cure? Park in one of the three and a half legal parking spaces still available in Dublin (there are rumoured to be about seven left in Cork and Galway), thus avoiding contact with the clampers. Otherwise you could try an appeal. There was uproar in Galway recently over the clamping of a car which was being used to drive a sick child to hospital. Clamping company Control Plus even apologised, which is not something you hear from the men in white vans every day. Mostly, though, you are in the wrong and they are in the right. You could always swap the car for a motorbike or a bicycle. They aren't authorised to clamp these modes of transport. Yet.

What annoys you most?

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