her name is Zoë Bread and she doesn’t show her face, and she’s a British artist whose videos are basically her fucking with people in harmless ways - like, asking retail workers if they want an “official” picture of King Charles that is in fact a cartoon and filming their bewilderment (the person is never in the video; she films the floor and her shoes while she’s doing this). she also calls up companies who have stuff like “call us to talk about [X]!” written on their products to see if they’ll really talk to her about [X] and if the person at the call centre doesn’t know (“full unedited silence” is a feature in most of her videos), she will dig and dig until she finds someone who can. or, until she gets bored, which. fair. can’t fault that.
I’m currently trying to get a member of the british peerage to give me £50 because we’re distant cousins. I appreciate her.
she travels around for these videos and one day she went to Manchester and parked on a road called Collier Street.
Collier Street has (or had, at the time) another car park at the end of it - the SIP car park. SIP is a private company that runs these. the signage on Collier Street indicated that the payment machine there was where you’re supposed to pay, so Zoë and a fuckload of other people assumed that that was where you got the tickets. Zoë put it on her car and went about fucking with whoever she decided to confuse today
she gets back to her car, has a parking ticket, and is confused
again - she paid for a ticket. she wasn’t trying to get out of paying.
because she’d bought a ticket from the machine that the SIP car park instead of the council run machine that is actually on a different road, she’d been ticketed. and, rightly so, she contests it and the person at the council says that the rules are the rules and there’s clear signage
Zoë: the signage is misleading
council: we don’t believe it is
council: we believe the signage is adequate
Zoë, being Zoë, doesn’t agree with this. she pulls up literal years’ worth of data on the history of that sign, the parking on the road, and the number of people who got ticketed. very early on, she says she’s not actually bothered about her own ticket, but she’s upset that people are being caught out and sees that it’s a money-making scheme for the council. she speaks to parking wardens, who mostly seem to agree that the signage is misleading. she has data. she calls them back. same response.
Zoë, being an artist, makes her own sign. which she puts up below the official one. and then she waits to see how long it is before it’s taken down.
[note: there was a side quest sometime during this - it went on for months - where she put cones in the parking spaces. the council moved them onto the pavement/sidewalk. this made it inaccessible for wheelchair users, people with prams, other people who can’t just move around them, which is illegal. so she called the council repeatedly to complain about the cones and monitored them until they were moved. this took ages - we are talking weeks.]
Zoë’s sign gets taken down.
the signpost it was attached to, with the misleading sign, becomes a point of pilgrimage for British people who appreciate a good bit of humour with the intent of bullying the local government. it is COVERED in stickers.
her sign is taken down. the sign is not changed. more people get tickets.
[there was a second side quest, where Zoë discovers that the SIP car park - the private one - doesn’t have planning permission. she doesn’t let this slide.]
not happy with this, Zoë calls in to the local radio station. which has a Q&A with Andy Burnham. the Mayor of Manchester. she calls in and asks him about this. Andy Burnham says he’s taking her concern into consideration and will look into it, and get back to her if she calls in next week.
she’s not put through next week.
she calls in again and brings it up.
[all this is happening while she’s repeatedly ringing the council to ask them about it]
she has gone from “harmless tiktok prankster” to “calling out government incompetence”. with a MASSIVE platform.
eventually, after her being interviewed by the BBC, Manchester City Council puts up a sign saying where the actual car park for Collier Street is (there is a running bit where a council worker misheard her and thought she said “Collyhurst Street”, which to my knowledge does not exist. Zoë now exclusively refers to it as that, including in her radio appearance and on her phone calls)
she isn’t done. she now has a petition to force the government to change vague signage. the government said no, all their signage is adequate. she’s now fighting with them. in one of her most recent videos, she was on the phone with the House of Commons enquiry department trying to figure out how to contest it. she’s brilliant.
anyway, this is why the art of Fucking About must never be lost. big up Zoë
