Letter: A little lesson in politeness for a New Milton traffic warden

I witnessed something that I would consider extremely rude from a traffic warden patrolling New Milton high street.

An elderly couple double parked outside Oxfam bookshop to drop off some thing, and before the gentleman had got to the boot of his car, a traffic warden ran over and started writing a ticket. The lady pointed out to the traffic warden that her husband was dropping some charity bags into the charity shop. The traffic warden’s response to this was: “I don’t care, you’re getting a ticket.”

Surely a better response would’ve been ‘I’m very sorry madam but you’re not allowed to park here, you will need to find a parking space somewhere else and carry your bags to the charity shop’. I went and helped the gentleman unload his bags and politely told the warden I thought his response wasn’t very nice, and that he could have asked them to move on rather than just issue a ticket, his response was: “I don’t care.”

I finished my shopping on the high street and when I got back to the car, the warden was still hanging around. I told him was still disappointed with his response, and the warden switched on his body cam and aggressively came over to me and started questioning me.

Don’t get me wrong, I know traffic wardens have a vital part to play in keeping the flow of traffic on our high street and they do a very valuable job.

But I do feel that sometimes they can be overzealous, and perhaps some public-facing retraining would be appropriate.

Name and address supplied