The Other Half of the Story

As longtime TSR followers can well imagine, coffee nearly shot out my nose at the breakfast table on Saturday when I unfolded the New York Times:

San Franciscans Hurl Their Rage at Parking Patrol

... Over all, 2006 was a dangerous year for those hardy souls handing out tickets here, with 28 attacks, up from 17 in 2005.

All of which has left officials in this otherwise civilized community scrambling to explain, and solve, “parking rage.” [...]

People in the field say abuse is common, often frightening and, occasionally, humiliating. In November, an officer was spat on, another was punched through the window of his Geo Metro, and an irate illegal parker smashed the windshield of another officer’s golf-cart-like vehicle.

“Just driving down the street, you get yelled at,” said Lawanna Preston, staff director for Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents parking control officers. [...]

“They can’t even eat lunch with that uniform on, because people approach them and curse at them,” Ms. Preston said. [...]

That frustration extends all the way to people like George Anderson, president of the American Association of Anger Management Providers, a mental health group, who said the parking problems here were so notorious that he had stopped holding paid lectures here.

“They’d be angry when they walked in,” said Mr. Anderson, a clinical social worker who lives in Los Angeles. “I’d spend half my time defending why I couldn’t include parking in the fee.”

A shout-out to the kind souls who forwarded this article my way. You see now why this blog was founded on the dual pillars of singing and parking.

I take umbrage at one thing in the article, though:

“It’s hard for me to understand people reacting in such a hostile manner,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees parking. “Clearly, this is a working person simply doing their job.”

Mr. Ford, have you ever considered the fact that your Parking Control Officers are themselves abusive sadists, who repeatedly fabricate tickets based on falsifed times, who write tickets for cars that still have 5 minutes left on the meter, who reject appeals even with multiple affidavits proving the invalidity of a citation, who surround the DPT office with 1-hr meters (knowing full well that no one gets out of there within an hour), who inflate authorized penalties and replace them with arbitrary amounts that are double what's allowed by law, who....

Excuse me, I have to lie down.

Comments

[ACB]

hehehehehe

[m.croche]

Young man, clean up that coffee before you go lie down.

[Patrick Vaz]

I thought about you when I saw that story! Yet another reason I'm glad to be a non-driver -- a friend of mine pointed out I get road rage as a pedestrian.

[spark and foam]

Ay-men, brother. My blood pressure rose just reading your description, and I haven't lived in SF in six years. XO Violet