Apparently everyone in IT is entirely unable to estimate how long a hacking job will take.
“Jim! How long will it take you to hack into the mainframe and redirect auxillary power to the generators?!!”
“Wow, at least 3 to 4 hours.”
“You’ve got 5 minutes. Go, go, go!”
(Hey, whadda ya know? I did it.)
No one ever has trouble parking. There’s always a free space immediately in front of wherever they’re visiting.
No one ever coughs, sneezes, or sniffles. If they do, it’s an ominous sign of a terminal disease.
It’s the Scotty approach to miracle working.
I hate Hate HATE every time people bring this up.
Unless it is a specific plot point or one is going to use the time for exposition, having parking in a TV show/movie work like real life would kill the flow of the show. As a NYC driver and parker, no one wants to watch someone circle around in a 5 block radius for 20 minutes like a vulture looking for carrion, nor wait 10 minutes to get one’s car parked at a garage (and even longer getting it back out). And even if a director is using the time for exposition, it’s really boring screen time. You’ll lose the audience.
No one is getting it wrong. This (and many other mundane tasks whose time is shortened) is done on purpose because watching real life is boring. It’s called pacing, and the script writers/directors are getting it right (in regards to this).
If you want more realistic pacing, I’ve been watching some old cop shows where they indeed show every time-consuming detail. Here’s a scene from O’Hara, U.S. Treasury:
“Okay, Sarge. Worldwide Widgets. We’ll check out their factory.” Do they then show them arriving at the widget factory? Nooooo…
David Janssen and partner leave their sergeant’s office, get their coats off their chairs, wind their way through the warren of desks and leave the precinct office. Down a hallway, past the shoeshine guy by the front door. Finally a cut, to an exterior shot as they exit the building and walk down the office steps, cross the sidewalk, get in the car, slam the doors, there’s a pause as they put on their seat belts, then we hear the car start, wait for a few civilians to pass by, then pull out into traffic… and we still have to watch them take forever to drive uptown!
Back in the late 60s/early 70s, they seem to be taking what would nowadays be a half hour show and expanding it to fill an hour of police “drama” (often without any actual drama due to the leaden pace). So give me shortened “reality” any day.
One that always gets me is the plot device where one of the officers/investigators/technicians has a personal relationship to the victim/suspect and they are allowed to continue to “work the case”. Maybe in some Podunk town where there are only two investigators and one is on vacation, but IRL they would never allow the “C of Ds” to pursue his daughter’s rapist. It would never happen.
And even at that, they’d cut the paperwork entirely simply so the result would be watchable, as opposed to something akin to the mid-air refueling scenes in The Starfighters, or the driving scenes in Manos: The Hands of Fate.
That’s why shows will never be able to show the actual task of programming or system administration or, for that matter, writing or editing something like a film script. It’s too internal. The closest you could come would be showing a meeting where the ideas for the program are discussed, or showing the writer pacing around talking to themself trying to clear a creative block. So I don’t fault script writers for not writing that stuff accurately. I do fault them for holding onto particularly stupid clichés, but more because they’re clichéd than anything else.
If done right, it can work. I know it wasn’t exactly the same thing, but in The Sopranos series finale, Meadow Soprano’s struggle to park across the street from the diner she was meeting her family at was very effective.
The list of credits for a picture include Foley Editor. They dub in sound that adds atmosphere. They love birds, but know nothing about them.
Foley Editors alllive in Southern California, and on weekends they take their family to the desert, where they can’t miss hearing the noisy Cactus Wrens. That’s what they think birds sound like outside the city. So when they have a scene of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, they dub in Cactus wrens.
The Common Loon makes an auditory appearance in every film from the creepy Louisiana swamps. But loons pass through Louisiana only in migration, and are silent when not on their northwoods nesting grounds.
Everybody now seems to know that Bald Eagles are silent. Except the Foley Editors, who simply can’t resist the knee-jerk temptation to dub in the call of the Red Tailed Hawk wherever an eagle appears.
And, of course, frogs. The only species of frog in America that says “rivet” lives in Califormia. Anywhere besides the Pacific coast, you’ll never hear a frog say “rivet”.
Arizona is a weird hybrid. They combine CA and the rest of the country and say “The I-10”. It grates both of my sensibilities - the WI (I90) part and the LA part (the 101).
Or, to mention another local pet peeve - the newscasters, they say it like that. 
That was a plot point, building the tension for the upcoming ambiguous series ending. I certainly don’t think it can never be used, just that it needs a purpose other than portraying the reality of finding parking in a city. jtur88 excellently describes things they get wrong every time. Street parking is not one of them.
I don’t think showing unnecessary everyday time consumption always has to advance a plot point or to provide exposition. If you have a quirky filmmaking style you could use it to insert entertaining vignettes which are pleasantly random and/or provide insight to the character’s personality. Now I’m not sure if anyone like the Coen Brothers has ever done that but it’s possible.
Yeah, the idea that the access control system is actively collaborating with the bad guy is hilarious! A proper security system will be specifically designed to provide no information beyond “invalid login”, whether the problem is the user name, the password, the combination, or something else, and after “n” failed attempts it should go into defensive mode and lock out the account altogether. It will definitely NOT say “ooohh … so close, try it again with a different sixth digit this time!” 
You have a good point about pacing, but it’s possible to achieve both pacing and realism at the same time. You can just show the guy getting out of the car already parked, or skip that part entirely and just show him walking into the building. What drives the “unrealism” meter into the red is when the scene shows the hero’s car gliding gracefully to a stop directly in front of a major NYC building on a major NYC street with not another car anywhere in sight.
Ditto. I don’t go to the movies to see hyper-realism. Reality, in its full mundane glory, is boring and only in extreme situations suitable to dramatic pacing. Just get to the meat of the story and keep it going. It’s never once occurred to me or taken me out of the movie because someone finds a parking space too quickly. And, yes, of course this can be subverted for dramatic effect or to prolong suspense, but 95% of the time I don’t need realistic parking or a cut scene to side-step the issue.
Could happen, especially on street cleaning days or on roads with no parking. 
Since somebody already invoked TVTropes:
I’ve been involved in public education my entire life, and I have never heard the leader of the school called “Principal Smith”. The principal is always Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones. The job title is never used in addressing the person or referencing the person in other conversation. On TV programs, however, the principal seems always to be “Principal So-and-So”.
I’m always amazed at how people in New York City manage to run into each other. They live in a city of millions of people from all over the world, yet bump into each other while shopping, dining, or whatever.
I think in most big cities the only way it could happen is if it was a “don’t even think about stopping here” zone, where our hero would have his car towed away before he even had a chance to get out of it.
It could also happen if the entire street was closed because a movie was being filmed there.
I don’t know about NYC, but, as a Chicagoan, it happen more often than you would expect. People from similar social circles tend to shop/eat/etc at similar places.
This happens more often than one might think. I’ve been very surprised quite a number of times at chance meetings. It’s not a daily occurence, nor even monthly, but maybe one to three times a year.