Well, well, well.
Look at you living life in the fire lane.
Yes, you came, you parked, you went over time, and you know it.
Now you’re scrambling out of the laundromat with a teetery stack of folded towels, racing out of the barber shop with a a freshly shorn neck, or running out of the arcades with severe Pac Man wrist and pizza grease on your face.
As you race up the street you can’t help braincloud the worst case scenario waiting for you: ticket blowing under wipers, heavy fine hitting your pocket, and a frumpy meter maid pursing her lips and wagging her finger at you while shaking her head.
When you get to the car you see the telltale signs: zeros flashing on the meter, tow trucks prowling the alleys, and those maids swimming upstreet like uniformed sharks with pens, pads, and perms. But as you examine your windshield you notice one big thing missing: the parking ticket itself.
Brother, there is no time for questions. Just double scan that windshield, crank your car into drive, and hit the gas to zoom fast and zoom furious straight outta town.
You made it.
AWESOME!
Check out the Top 1000.
— Email message —
“Hey Neil! My amazing sister just sent me The Book of Awesome for my birthday and it could not have come at a better time. I recently moved halfway across the world for a new job and while I’m loving starting a new life, I definitely miss my family back home and reading the book always stirs up wonderful memories of them. Her sending me this came as a total surprise and just showed how well she knows me, how much she loves me and how awesome she really is. Here’s a pic of my sister and I skyping!” – Nicole
Photo from: here
There may not be anything more relieving (not counting bodily functions, that’s a different category of relief) than seeing that you don’t (yet) have a ticket when you should.
One time, my freshman year in the dorms, I was parked in a metered spot out front. No one patrolled those after a certain time, usually, so I dropped in a nickel (four minutes) and ran upstairs to grab something. When I came out (after much longer than four minutes), I saw the ticket-man observing my license plate and taking out his ticket-tablet. I broke into a dead-sprint and started screaming that I was coming.
And he didn’t give me a ticket. So awesome.
Hehe I don’t have a licence yet, but I can definitely imagine how awesome it would be to dodge that parking ticket!
I thank the mighty Thor whenever this happens.
There are days where I’m just glad I made it from Point A to Point B in one piece.
A real citizen celebrates when he gets a parking ticket. Because then he knows the system works as it should.
/prepares to be lynched
but parking tickets are such bull. why worry about that when cops could be chasing REAL criminals?
Ah, yes. Because goodness knows that even if cops didn’t enforce the law, everyone would follow them anyway!
Stop rationalizing your selfishness.
Besides, ever heard of a meter maid? They’re not cops.
Friend, I will gladly help YOU celebrate YOUR parking ticket … as for me, I’m going to jump for joy when I realize I don’t have one :)
I wanted to repost this, but I couldn’t since it said got instead of *gotten. I don’t even know if the grammar’s wrong or not, it just doesn’t sound right. 0.0
You’re right Keren. It is gotten and this bothers me too. Other than that, good post Neil!
It’s worrying when you see that tiny piece of paper beneath your wipers, but so much more relieving when you discover it’s a flyer for something benign.
Haha, no kidding. The one and only time you end up celebrating the solicitation.
I never notice anything on my windshield until after I get in my car. I could coming to my car, look straight at the front of it and still not notice.
Me too, Bekah.
I’ll be driving along for a bit before I notice the flapping yellow slip. There have even been times when I expected the ticket, and then thought I’d been lucky, and then realized half way home that there was, indeed, a ticket. Let-down city.
We don’t really have the parking maids here. There’s like two little city cars that drive around and give people tickets for going over their parking limit and such. I did get one parking ticket and that was in college. I got a new car and didn’t have my parking pass, but I parked in the student section anyway. (If you don’t have a parking pass you have to park in the visitors parking) I ended up getting a ticket. Not cool. But yeah…I should have known better.
Now… other tickets are a different story. There were a few times I should have gotten a speeding ticket, got pulled over and all that fun stuff, but didn’t get a ticket. That’s awesome.
The visitor’s lot at my school is a metered lot. How welcoming and friendly. Haha. You can get a visitor’s pass, but anyway …
Lucky about the speeding tickets! I have only been pulled over once … and I definitely got a speeding ticket. I worked at a law firm for a summer, though, so they … uh … helped me out. I mean I still had to pay it (actually, I paid almost double), but it stayed off my record and didn’t make our insurance go up. Phew.
Whoever up above spoke about the victories of the system working would hate me for that paragraph.
My grandpa just used to throw the tickets out the window
Oh my gosh, a while back I saw this guy yank his tickets (yes, ticketS) out from under his windshield wiper, crumple them up, and throw them on the ground. I was baffled. I didn’t know people did such a thing. Off and on all day, I wondered to myself what would happen. I guess I still do … don’t you get a warrant for your arrest for failing to pay a ticket and/or show up in court?
I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to not pay a ticket. Not that I make it a habit to get tickets. Ok, so I’ve only gotten one parking ticket (and I mailed the check for it that day … haha).
Don’t know the law wherever you live, but in Vermont you can get arrested. My son let a bunch of parking tickets accumulate until one day he got pulled over. Arrested on the spot, car towed, spent a night in jail. Tickets plus late fines totalled enough that he has gone without his license for several years until he (finally) got them all paid off, and is now re-getting his license.
We take illegal parking right serious up here you know.
OH MY GOSH!!! Wow, that is serious. I’m pretty sure you can get arrested for non-paid tickets here (Missouri), too.
I was on crutches after badly spraining my ankle playing volleyball, and was hobbling as fast as I could to get to my car when I saw the officer approaching. I knew that time had expired and it was a race to see who would reach my car first. He did. But I gave him my most piteous look and didn’t give me the ticket. Awesome, yes!
I love when this happens. It IS awesome.
Parking tickets are the only kind of ticket that I’ve gotten. I constantly park in a permit only zone without a permit and have never gotten a ticket. I’ll probably get one now since I’ve said that though lol.
Luck always comes in handy in life :)
Once I had guests who I assured would not get a ticket if they parked on the street in front of my house overnight. Well… first thing in the morning, guess who was running outside quick to “get the paper”, & secretly grabbing the offending yellow slip from their windshield.
Later…
Them: “Oh! You were right! No ticket.”
Me: “hmmm…”
This NEVER happens to me! EVER!
The police on college campuses are brutal.
I can definitely relate to this one being from philly because it is such a rare occurrence that when it does happen it makes me want to dance.
thank you so much for this, it definitely put a much needed smile on my face =)
Just witnessed (and, actually, shared) this moment from a SW Washington, DC 2nd story office window. A colleague and I were at the window, watching the surprise sheets of rain just fall, when a DC Parking/Transport vehicle pulled up behind a car. As it played out, it was the sheets of rain which saved the driver. The parking/transport official was likely waiting out the heavy rain before ticketing. In the meantime, the driver happened to run in the rain to his car, soaked white tennis shoes and all, and smiled with immense satisfaction at the officer as he unlocked his car and got in.
we weren’t so lucky just the other day…thwarted again for $35 for precisely 35 minutes! However; on the bright side, the day was otherwise great!