Our main job is to keep traffic flowing.
I parked behind a row of parked cars and pulled out my little black book.
I checked the first meter: seventeen minutes left.
Second: three minutes. I should see the owner any time soon.
Third: Fourteen minutes.
Fifth: Expired. Oh, goody. On the ticket I wrote down the date of infraction, time of infraction, license plate number, vehicle plate, checked off box with code number one, placed my signature at the bottom, entered the unit and employee code, and gently placed the banana-coloured ticket under the windshield.
Sixth: No fee deposited. Good, another one.
Seventh: fifty-two minutes left.
Eighth: broken meter. I wrote a fifteen-dollar ticket.
Whoa! The meter is broken! The owner should not have to pay for the ticket, right? Wrong. Parking at a busted meter is illegal.
Some people tamper with meters on purpose in order to avoid paying the fee. It’s quite easy to sabotage a meter. It can be done with a piece of paper, by jamming the mechanism and fishing out the parking fee with a paper clip. But I’m not going to say exactly how.
As I was on my twelfth someone ran up. “I was only gone for two minutes,” he said.
Sorry, sir. I see an expired meter,” I said and moved on. It’s always two minutes. The man muttered something under his breath.
I’ve been called many things: Meter Maid, Green Hornet, Vulture, and other lovely terms that I didn’t know existed in the English dictionary.
The first couple of days on the job were terrible. The things that were said to me left me scared. I stopped sleeping, and I love to sleep. I dreaded going to work and having to confront these types of people. The looks they gave, the upstanding middle fingers, the curses. Now, I’m immune to it. In fact, I think I’ve become cynical.
If they say, “Screw you,” I say, “Thank you.” That pisses them off.
If they say, “Kiss my ass,” I say, “Sir, it’ll take me a whole week to kiss all that.”
I keep smiling and that truly annoys them.
I remember once this nice lady placed a spell on me, saying I’d die a horrible death in ten days. That was eight months ago, and seeing that I’m still alive, the spell didn’t work.
Maybe someone has a voodoo doll of me. Every so often they poke needles into my head. No wonder I can’t think straight. Maybe…just maybe, they place a pillow over my head and…yes, now it makes perfect sense, that’s why I feel sleepy all the time.
I drove into a more upscale commercial street. This street had something that made all PEOs life easier: pay-and-display kiosks. Each of these babies replaced ten parking meters. Plus, these high-tech solar-powered kiosks were reliable and difficult to vandalize.
All I had to do was look at the receipt on their windshield, and if it was expired I gave them a PIN.
I drove to a public parking lot and made a quick round when I saw a car parked in the disabled zone. I scanned the vehicle and found a placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I went back into my cruiser and contacted the communication dispatcher. Parking Enforcement vehicles are not mobile workstations, meaning we have no access to police information systems-at least, not yet. The dispatcher, linked to police systems such as CPIC (Canadian Police Information Center) and MTO (Ministry of Transportation of Ontario), responded to my query over the radio network.
This disabled permit was on the wrong vehicle.
Beautiful.
I wrote a ticket for three hundred dollars and placed it under the windshield. I was about to leave when the owner showed up.
“What are you doing?” he yelled from a distance.
I did not answer.
“Hey, man. I’m talking to you. What the hell are you doing?” He hobbled toward me.
“I’m giving you a ticket, sir,” I said. What I really wanted to say was: don’t mind that, that’s just a flyer.
“You can’t give me a ticket,” he said, waving his hands.
I hate people who abuse rights that are for the disadvantaged.
“Can’t you see my foot?” he said, pointing to his right foot.
I looked at it carefully and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. It looked like any other foot. Maybe it was shorter than the other one, but I didn’t want to mention it.
“It’s broken,” he said.
“Sorry to hear that, but that placard is not registered to your vehicle, sir,” I said.
“The permit belongs to my aunt and since I broke my leg she lent it to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said.
“What do you want me to do in this condition? Park at the end of the lot and walk?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I’m just enforcing the by-laws.”
“You can’t do this,” he said. He was in my face.
“I just did,” I said.
Veins popped up in his forehead.
“You can’t do this,” he repeated. “I know my rights. I’m gonna take you to court.”
There was a crowd gathering around us. This was going to get nasty.
A woman carrying way too many shopping bags said, “This man is hurt. There should be a law against you guys.”
Everyone approved.
I wasn’t about to start a verbal tennis match with the woman, so I pulled out my cell and dialed a number. I said a few words and turned to the violator.
“All right, sir,” I said. “Please follow me.”
I led the man away from the crowd. He hobbled alongside me. We stopped at a spot where, in the distance, his vehicle was clearly visible.
“Now, sir,” I said. “I think we should discuss this in a civilized manner.”
“Yeah,” the man said.
“How did you break your foot, sir?” I asked.
“I dropped a bowling ball.”
“Sorry to hear that. It must have hurt. Shatter your toes?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, broke your foot terribly?”
“Yeah, hurt like hell,”
“I bet it did, sir. I’m just doing my job. I checked the permit records and it does not belong to your vehicle.”
“Yeah,” he began to stumble. “It belongs to my dad.”
“You mean aunt.”
“Yeah, aunt. She’s actually my dad’s aunt. After I broke my foot she lent it to me.”
I nodded.
“I was gonna get my own, y’know,” he said, as if he could walk into any store and pick a disabled parking permit off the shelf.
“So what do you want me to do?”
He cleared his throat after seeing I was willing to compromise, which I was not. I was simply buying time.
“I don’t think I should get the ticket,” he said.
“You want me to take back the ticket?”
“Yeah. I got witnesses and I’ll take you to court.”
He would do that, after he saw I’d given him a three-hundred-dollar ticket.
I lowered my voice and leaned in. He got closer, too. “Sir, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to keep that ticket and you’re going to pay it within fifteen days.”
Veins popped up in his forehead again.
“And sir, you’re going to run. Run as fast as you can.”
“What?” he said perplexed.
I turned and looked in the direction of his vehicle; he instinctively did the same.
A tow truck was getting ready to haul his car.
The man forgot about his injury and dashed. I never knew someone with a broken foot could run that fast.
Now let’s see those witnesses.
Some days my job was so much fun.
I went to a fast-food restaurant, the one with the golden arches, but I’m not saying which one. I sat in my cruiser and ate away at my chicken burger. We’re not supposed to eat in our vehicles, but who would know, right?
What else do PEOs do? Give tickets every minute of every hour? No. Like I mentioned earlier, we deter crimes. We’ve recovered stolen goods, assisted police officers in arrests, and even prevented robberies.