“Dear Meterperson, I was putting in a quarter and the machine FAILED. Thank you.”A pedestrian ambling along a certain downtown street might encounter a car with the note pictured at left on its winshield. Apparently, the meter has stopped working, as you can see from the picture on the right (though it wasn’t clear that that was the right meter for the space). Does that mean that the car’s driver had the good fortune of finding the only free street spot downtown?No, says Supervisor George Murray of the SPD’s Parking Enforcement unit. “People will put a slug in there to jam up a machine,” he explains. “The only recourse you have is not to park there, or to go get a receipt” from one of the more modern pay stations.