The Standing Room

Spoonful of Sugar

Note to self: Next time I break into somebody's car...

...remember to flatter the owner of the vehicle by scattering some "you are beautiful" stickers around the car.

(at least they didn't take my pitchpipe this time)

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.

Sartre Visits TSR

Hell is...

$128.25 passenger vehicle tow fee + $60.00 admin fee + $60.00 parking violation + $1.50 MUNI Ride of Bitterness = $249.75, or the cost of remembering at 4:30 that you needed to move the car at 4

(Did you just hear that giant sucking sound?)

Cretins Only Need Apply

It's been a while since we've had a good parking story on TSR, but this one's got the bile churning again.

Tables turn on cheating Boston ticket writer
By Donovan Slack, Globe Staff | May 26, 2006

It's been said that guardians make the best thieves, but consider this one.

A city parking-ticket writer, one of the blue-jacketed officers sworn to uphold Boston's parking rules, according to city officials, last week discovered a ticket on her car, a citation for parking in a resident-parking zone without a sticker.

The officer marched into work the next day, ticket in hand, and told her boss that she, in fact, had a resident sticker and wanted the ticket cleared.

Her supervisor went outside to have a look. Sure enough, there was the sticker, properly mounted in the right rear window of the officer's car. But it didn't look right. It was severely faded, and when the supervisor ran the sticker's serial number through city computers, it drew up someone else's name. A disciplinary hearing was called.

Confronted by officials at the hearing on Tuesday, the officer—whose name was not released—began to confess. After originally saying she'd found the sticker in the street, city officials said, she told her questioners that she actually procured it from someone outsidean East Boston laundromat who asked, "Do you want to buy a hot sticker?"

The officer has been suspended without pay for five days and faces possible termination, pending an investigation.

Muito obrigado, Senhor R—

Saturday Morning Quiz

It is a beautiful, brisk Saturday morning, with clear visibility all the way to the ocean. Under these conditions, you must:

a) Hurry over to Fort Funston to watch the hang-gliders and play with the dogs.

b) Represent at a march protesting the absurdity and repulsiveness of three years of Iraq occupation with no end in the foreseeable future.

c) Head straight to Amoeba to pick up some Glenn Branca CDs.

d) Show up at 8:30am for eight consecutive hours of mind-numbing traffic school in a dingy room with no open windows, no sunlight, flickering fluorescent lighting, idiotic multiple choice exams, and the "legendary" Mr. Lee.

NY Report: Welcome to New York!

It's your home away from home.

(Apparently bad carma is even transferrable to people who are kind enough to give me a ride.)

(-: / :-(

That Janus, he truly is a two-faced god. On the one of the hands,

:-)

(Confidential to Mlle S-: I appreciated the call very, very much, and laughed very, very heartily. Now we just need to get you a camera phone.)

And on the other of the hands,

:-(

My appeal was rejected. Such is the Force of Destiny.

A DPT Christmas Story

Let's say you were parked on an unmetered block with a 3-hour limit.

Let's say you got back into your car after 2 hours.

Let's say you drove around the city making multiple stops.

Let's say you returned to that same block several hours later and coincidentally parked in approximately the same spot again.

Let's say you returned to your car after another couple of hours to find a parking ticket, charging that you had been parked for longer than the time limit.

Let's say that the citation was issued by a Parking Control Officer who first checked the car 15 minutes before you left the area, and then checked it again 15 minutes after you returned.

Let's say that for almost the entire time that this ticket warrants you were parked, you were actually driving around the city making the aforementioned multiple stops.

Let's say you then collect four affidavits verifying your departure time, your appointments around the city, and your return.

Let's say you send the affidavits with a protest letter to the DPT.

Let's say two months later you get a letter back claiming that you have not responded to the citation and that the penalty will be doubled.

Let's say that the same day you receive that letter, you send in all of the materials again, paying for registered mail.

Let's say four months later you get a letter saying, "The circumstances you presented in your protest were insufficient to overcome the validity of the citation. The review has confirmed that the citation was properly issued and is valid."

Let's say that the letter also instructs you that for an administrative hearing you have to show up at the DPT office within 21 calendar days of the date of the letter, or else you forfeit the right to protest further.

Let's say the letter arrived a week after it was dated, even though intra-city mail normally arrives the next day.

Let's say the calendar days remaining include Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.

Let's say you were planning on enjoying your hard-won and scarce vacation days at the end of the year.

Let's say you now have to waste half of one of those hard-won and scarce vacation days arguing with the cretins at the DPT office.

Wouldn't that be enough for you to cry out, "Ah! la maledizione!"????

Here ends the lesson.

~~~~~~

Happy goddamned holidays, you goddamned DPT bastards. I curse you all.

Gavin Takes on the DPT!

I admit it, back in 2003 I was with those hipsters dancing on Valencia in support of Matt Gonzalez (aka The Dreamy One) over Gavin Newsom (aka The Shellacked One) during the last mayoral election (aka The SF Babe Competition). But any lingering doubts I had about Gavin, even after the gay marriage business, have now been completely swept away—I am in love!

Mayor fumes at hours-long lines at parking office
Sees for himself why the public is so angry, frustrated at wait to pay tickets, permits
Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2005

There's a lot of anger, frustration and just plain disbelief inside the walls of 1380 Howard St., a nondescript, four-story building full of city offices in San Francisco's South of Market district.

There, on the first floor, an average of 565 people show up at the Department of Parking and Traffic's customer service [HA! -ed.] center every weekday to pay parking fines, protest tickets and pick up residential parking permits.

But before they pick up what they came for, they wait. And wait.

"I was just here a few days ago,'' said Kirt Patel, who owns a small manufacturing company in the southwest part of town and needed a parking permit. "And I didn't come back here because I like it so much." On his first visit, he left after waiting in line for 2 1/2 hours, never having reached the customer service window. He was giving it another shot Wednesday.

...

Standing at the front of the line at one point Wednesday was Phil McGarvey, who said he had been hanging out for two hours to pick up his parking permit. "Why isn't someone at City Hall checking on this?'' he asked.

Actually, someone is. Mayor Gavin Newsom stopped by Tuesday to see for himself why his office was being flooded with complaints* about the center.

His assessment: "It's an embarrassment. I should go even further: It's absolutely unacceptable. There's no excuse.''

...

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the current setup at Howard and 10th streets is that the waits are so long, the people lined up to pay their parking citations pile up new ones. The nearby meters expire after an hour.

"I already accepted the fact that I'm getting a ticket while I'm here,'' Kelly O'Brien said after she had waited an hour to advance about two-thirds of the way through the line.

Moments later a man standing behind her shouted, "Oh s--- !'' as he looked out the window and watched a parking control officer slap a ticket on his  windshield.

~~~~~~

* That's me! That's me!

Big thanks to Mme H- for bringing this to my attention.

Die Stehplätze (TSR Temporarily Turns Teutonic)

So this is what Schadenfreude feels like!

Parking Officer Injured in Scooter Accident
Posted August 10, 2005 at 8:25 a.m.

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON)—A San Francisco Traffic Control Officer remains in the hospital with severe injuries after an accident involving possibly faulty brakes on her city-issued three-wheel scooter.

[Mlle Z-] suffered serious injuries when the scooter failed to stop and crashed into a carpet cleaning truck last week.

[Mlle Z-] says she had complained about the scooter just before the accident.

"All of a sudden, I put my brakes on to slow myself down," a tearful [Mlle Z-] told KRON 4's Tomas Roman. "The vehicle kept just kept going. I said 'Help, Help.'"

Truck driver Georgio Atanasov said,"I felt the hit and then I still heard the hit and then I heard screaming and yelling."

"Help, help"? Hee, hee! Can there be any doubt of the existence of Karma?

This post is dedicated to the Yahoo! searcher who found TSR today by typing in fuck sf dpt. (As for the Googler who's looking for soma loft coelacanth, I'm sorry I'm of no use there.)

~~~~~~

UPDATE: Ah, I knew this post was too mean-spirited to get by without comment. In reality, I do feel terrible for this woman. I don't ever really wish anyone ill. (Except for PCO J.T.; he's a genuine son of a Gibich and should be purged from the earth.) But speaking of familial relations, did anyone else remark in the video that Mlle Z-'s mother, Mme Z-, is also a Parking Control Officer? That's all I'll say about that.