If it was anybody else they’d be madly scribbling tickets and demanding that you move. Not only is the first one parked in a red zone, there is a second one double parked alongside it!

They should be issuing each other with tickets at this point, not standing there chatting (presumably about their day of harassing people who were confused by the ridiculous number of different types of parking zones and different rules and exceptions for each in San Francisco.

In some places the meters have different coloured caps to confuse you some more; there are yellow capped and green capped meters for different restrictions on parking. The odd one though is the red capped meter. Red normally means no parking, ever, no exceptions (unless you’re a DPT employee apparently). So what does a red capped meter mean? No parking ever, but when you do (illegally) make sure you drop some quarters in there as well or they’ll get you for parking on an expired meter as well as in a red zone?