I didn’t post a Crock Pot Crosspost yesterday. I’m sore ashamed.
I don’t have a good reason, but I do have a reason. I was in a fight with parking enforcement at my place of work for the better part of the day. It was righteous anger I was unleashing, you understand, I couldn’t just turn my back on the noble fight!
So, a day later, the best I can do for you is to try to make up for my blogging malfeasance by posting some of the more salient excerpts from my parking citation email “appeal”(redacted of course). I hope my suffering can bring you some glimmer of entertainment.
The email…
Dear Parking Enforcement Functionary:
I hesitate to submit a written appeal regarding citation #_____ because an appeal suggests that the citation has legitimacy. That’s troubling because the citation referenced above is baseless. That said, if you'd like to consider this email my formal, written appeal, do so. If I’m later accused of not appealing the baseless ticket, I’ll reference this email as my “appeal”.
When I arrived at my car last night I found that two events had transpired: 1) an orange parking pylon (henceforth known as the “cone of clusterfudge”) had been placed behind my car; and 2) a parking ticket had been placed upon my windshield. A “what the fudge?!” moment, if ever there was one.
Inside the ticket envelope I found two things: 1) a parking citation stating I had parked in a “prohibited coned off area”; and 2) a note from a fellow employee who’d been given a similar ticket. I’ll paraphrase the colleague’s note, but it basically said, “WTF?! Are these bizzos crazy? You can’t put a cone behind someone’s car and then ticket that person for parking in a ‘coned off area’; call me to plan our counterstrike.”
My first attempt at a strike counter to your cone of clusterfudge strike was to try to speak to someone in person at the parking enforcement office during regular business hours. I went to the front counter and said to the person I found standing there, “Who do I talk to about this?” as I pointed at my parking citation.
He was immediately confused and said, “Uh….I don’t know what you mean, like, about the parking ticket?”
I explained that, yes, I meant about the parking ticket, which I was still pointing at, and not about some other thing that I was not pointing at.
Like a champ, the low level functionary at the service counter came back with the appropriate perfunctory response, “Um, on the back of the ticket it says how to do an appeal.” Mm. Yes, good then. This will, as I expected, involve a significant wasting of my, maybe not precious but certainly mediumly valuable time.
“I’m not going to do that,” I said.
“Well…but, uh, you should,” said the functionary at the counter.
“Yeah, but I’m not going to. I’m going to talk to someone in person. Who do I talk to?”
Front counter functionary’s backup steps in, “Hi, he can’t do anything about your ticket.”
“Okay,” says me, “Who can? I want to speak to that person.”
The backup functionary to the front counter functionary says to me, “Well, all the managers aren’t here during the day.”
“When are they here?” asks me.
“From, like 3pm to 1am,” says the backup functionary.
I look at my watch: 3:45pm, “Hm. Mm hmm. Good then, I’m here just in time for those totally reasonable hours of business. Who will I be meeting with?”
“He’s not here, um, they’re not here,” says backup functionary. I notice a man wandering around nervously in the background.
“Ok, so I’ll schedule an appointment with one of the managers, then?”
“Um, okay,” responds backup functionary.
“How shall I reach him or them?” I ask.
“Well, you probably can’t meet with him, um, them, but you can give him your written appeal,” she responds.
“Yeah, I’m not going to do that,” says me, “There will be no written appeal.”
“Well, here’s his email address…” backup functionary scribbles down a, let’s for the benefit of the doubt say unintentionally, illegible email address.
Which brings me to my second attempt at a strike counter to your cone of clusterfudge: tracking down your email. I was able to read your first name, success! But with your last name what I had to do was look at everyone in the employee directory with a last name that started with the first three letters of your last name (which I could just barely make out) until I was able to triangulate all candidates with a) your first name, b) a last name that starts with the three letters I was able to identify, and c) a job title that could potentially be relevant to parking. And so I found you!
Now, I was told I was unlikely to be able to get a meeting with you, top ranking parking functionary, but I have decided to put my main beef in this email, with the hopes that it will inspire you to meet with me in the future to discuss the stupidity of your department’s actions. This email is my third attempt at a strike counter to your cone of clusterfudge.
My main beef, for posterity:
I am disappointed, nay, I am profoundly irritated, that when one of your department’s parking enforcement minions came upon my car and saw the cone of clusterfudge that had been placed behind it, said minion came to the conclusion that: I, a person with a parking pass who works and parks here daily, came upon a coned off parking space, stopped my vehicle, got out of my vehicle, removed the cone (or cones) in the area, pulled into the space, got back out of the car, placed a cone directly behind my own car, and then went about my day. Actually, what the parking minion concluded was that, not only was it likely that I had done this, but that another person had taken this same bizarro course of action as well.
What creases me verily, is that the parking minion on duty yesterday failed to recognize that it is far, far, far, FAR more likely that I, and the other wrongly ticketed person, parked in two normal parking spaces where someone later came along to put cones. Why someone later came along to put cones of clusterfudge there? I have no idea. It seems almost as stupid to put cones behind parked cars as it does to ticket people who’ve been retroactively coned, but that’s what happened.
So, top parking enforcement functionary, what you need to do at this time (since you can’t give me back the time and energy I’ve wasted on this clusterfudge and restore me to the position I was in before the cone of clusterfudge ticketing incident), is to dismiss the ticket I have been given and never speak of it again. And, going forward, you should refrain from ticketing people for their inability to foresee the future. Think about it anyway, if employees here were able to go about correctly foreseeing where cones would be placed in the future, wouldn’t they be able to leverage that magical power into a job where parking is comped?
If you’re looking for some sort of remorse from me, here it is: I am very and truly sorry that I am not a clairvoyant. It would be awesome to be clairvoyant.
I expect this situation to be rectified posthaste. And by rectified, I mean your entire department should be terminated….not killed, just fired.
You’re welcome for my time,
Buster Blonde
No recipe today, I’m too annoyed to eat.
