Friday, January 12, 2007

Another Reason to Hate Berkeley

So I get more than my fair share of parking tickets, but today I caught one of Berkeley's finest trying to screw me over.

The first thing I notice is that Berkeley has these awful parking kiosks where you have to put in money and purchase a label that has the time printed on it. What's awful is that all of these kiosks are five minutes behind, so that if it's really 1:00pm and you pay for an hour of parking, the ticket that comes out will invariably say 1:55pm (because the meter thinks its 12:55pm). And I'm sure that my meter maid's watch will invariably be five minutes too FAST.

Anyway, I took all of this into account this afternoon when I parked near campus and I even chose to get back to my car an extra ten minutes early. And what do you know, as I'm walking to my car, I see an Urkel-like parking enforcement rickshaw whiz by and stop next to my car. The cop looked out of his window and then looked at his watch, turned on his hazard lights, and started writing the ticket.

I got next to my car and looked at the ticket, which said 1:24pm. I looked at my watch and then at my cellphone, which both said 1:16pm! I looked at the clock on the kiosk, which was next to my car, and that said 1:11pm. I went up to the meter maid and said, "Hey, I still have time left on this meter. Why are you writing a ticket?" The guy didn't even look over and ignored me.

"Hello, I still have time on this meter. I still have about ten minutes left." He kept his head down, looked at his watch and shook his head. He kept puching numbers into his handheld ticket meter.

I just turned around and got into my car and turned on the engine. He suddenly looked over out of his window as if he didn't recognize me there at all. I looked him straight in the eye and then I saw him crumple up the ticket in his hand and drive off. He didn't even say a word.

Fuck Berkeley.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes indeed! Fuck Berkeley!!

Skyler Miller said...

Berkeley should be burned to the ground.