You also have plenty of time to think about how only two days ago you took all the quarters typically designated for parking meter usage out of your car's cup holder so that you could do some laundry.
For some reason I am fantastically irresponsible when it comes to parking tickets. I get WAY more of them than I should, and then I never (never!) pay them in a timely fashion. Or at all. Because as I mentioned earlier I'm an immature, irresponsible asshole.
For a a person who considers herself to be a fast learner this seems to be a lesson I cannot learn. Not even slowly, over a very long period of time. In college I got so many parking tickets in Ann Arbor that I finally got an upset phone call from my dad when he was notified by the State of Michigan that his driver's license would be suspended until they were all paid. The car I had at school was registered to him. This would have been problematic under any circumstance, but my dad was a professional truck driver before he retired, so it was especially bad in this case. There were a lot of tickets. I don't remember how many exactly, but it was a lot. And I was a broke college kid, which was probably why I A) hadn't properly fed the meters in the first place, and B) never paid the tickets once I got them. I'm pretty sure my parents paid to get me out of hot water that time (thanks mom and dad!), but it was perhaps more out of a desire to have my dad's license reinstated than it was to help me out. Lesson: not learned.
Fast forward to 2013. Six months ago I went into my office downtown for a morning meeting and I parked at a meter because I needed to leave quickly afterward, and also because the parking lot attendants are Creepy McStalkersons who ask me far too many personal questions and then also sometimes accidentally leave my car unlocked after they've moved it around the lot. So I opted for the privacy of a meter instead and I fed the greedy bastard its meal of quarters, but my time was scheduled to expire 15 minutes shy of my departure. I figured, "Hey, it's FIFTEEN minutes. I'll be OK." But luck was not on my side that day. Let's just say my car got a new boot and I didn't get new boots (or shoes, or groceries, or anything else) for quite some time. It's like the *only* thing that the City of Detroit can do efficiently these days.
That one I really had coming, and I knew it. I had a lot of tickets and some of them were several years old and I'd received a number of lovely letters from the City of Detroit's Parking Violations Bureau stating that my offenses had become so egregious that I was at risk of being booted if I was caught parking illegally again. Each letter offered me options to call and make payment arrangements and provided instructions for paying my debt, but I let them stack up in my basket of mail To Be Dealt With and figured I'd get to it eventually. And then that day in March those extra 15 minutes on the meter ended up costing me $645.
And I think I started to learn my lesson. I hadn't gotten a ticket in the City for many months prior to the boot, and from then on I kept a stash of quarters in my cup holder to feed meters when I needed to. And when I parked I set the timer on my phone to go off five minutes prior to the meter's expiration so that I could go out and feed it again if necessary. Check out the responsible on Maria!
But in the back of my mind I knew that underneath the stack of letters from the City there was another letter collecting dust and not a small amount of cat hair. This one was from the Michigan Department of State notifying me of a DRIVER LICENSE STOP ACTION that had been placed by the 44th District Court for - wait for it! - unpaid parking tickets!
I called the court when I received that letter. A stop action means you cannot renew your license or apply for an endorsement until you handle your business, but since my license doesn't expire til August of 2014 and I don't plan to apply for any endorsements, I figured I had some time to pay it. I was told I had four unpaid tickets, totaling $207. One was from 2010, another two from 2011, and the last from 2012. The clerk on the phone told me I needed to pay the $207 plus a service fee and then it would all be fine. I asked if I was at risk of any other action or of incurring any additional fees and she told me no. Then I hung up the phone. "I'll definitely take care of it before August 2014," I thought.
So today when I came around the corner to see the meter maid with sun-ravaged skin looking on as a young tattooed dude hoisted my car up onto the bed of his tow truck, the memory of that letter came rushing back to me. Apparently in addition to being barred from renewing my license, I was also at risk of being towed. Over four tickets! I like to think that if I had known that I could have gotten towed I wouldn't have put off paying the bill, but the boot warning didn't seem to sink in before so I can't really say for sure. What I can say for sure is that I pulled out every sad-sack excuse I could think of - complete with hysterical tears and snot for emphasis - and it made zero difference to that parking enforcement officer. I think the excessive sun exposure turned her skin into leather. She was impenetrable, unwavering, and not especially sympathetic.
Tomorrow my wonderful, kind, loving, non-judgmental boyfriend is going to get up obscenely early to drive me to the court right when it opens so that I can put my parking woes to rest, once and for all. I'm estimating the towing/impound fees to be at least $150, which means that in 2013 I will have spent a total of $1000 just so that I could park like an unforgivably irresponsible asshole.
A thousand dollars. A freaking grand!
Lesson officially learned.
(I hope.)
