Can you imagine a more collectively and consistently despised professional group than parking enforcement officers? Also known as “meter maids,” these individuals make their living largely by issuing parking tickets—to poor, hapless souls like me and you.
A good friend of mine who now calls Portland home recently told me that he had applied to be a meter maid.
“No! You will be hated!” I said.
“I know,” he told me. “But someone has to do it.”
“But it doesn’t follow that you have to do it.”
Fortunately for his sake (in my opinion at the time), over 200 people applied, and he didn’t get the job. (Interesting to note–people are willing to be paid $14.75–18.50 an hour to be universally despised.)
In my month and a half living in Portland, I have already incurred $120 in parking tickets. Fifteen dollars here, twenty-five dollars there… these add up!
What follows may be an extravagant example of cognitive dissonance—in other words, an attempt to see the bright side of an inherently bad situation by an act of mental maneuvering—but, upon some reflection, I’ve come to adapt my view of meter maids.
The incident that precipitated a change in my opinion happened just two days ago. Knowing that I was pushing my luck by parking in a two-hour zone for two-and-a-half hours, I scurried out of the Portland Magazine office to move my car. As I came closer to the area in which I’d parked, I happened upon a blue-suited man, ominously flipping through the pages of his oblong notebook whilst turning away from my teal ’05 Corolla. My immediate response: “Shit.” Under the left wiper blade of my car appeared a freshly-minted parking ticket.
“Uh, did you just—is that your—my—parking ticket?” I bumbled, as I met my new nemesis on the adjacent sidewalk. I tried not to be confrontational, instead attempting to assume a respectful and regretful tone.
“Yeah,” the man shrugged his shoulders. “Actually I clocked you almost three hours ago, so I gave you a bit of extra wiggle room.” Interestingly, he didn’t apologize for issuing the ticket. Instead, he offered some advice. “You know you can get a resident pass and park all day long in your own neighborhood. Just stop by City Hall with some proof of residency, and it shouldn’t be a problem to take care of.” If I’ve ever seen the basic precept of Zen at work, this was it: don’t worry about what’s already passed; focus
only on what you have control over.
Further, I figured, at least my hard-earned money is going back into the City’s coffers instead of toward, say, some profit-seeking corporation.
So it wasn’t such a bad day after all. I had just returned from an assignment at Simply Scandinavian Foods, and I was nearing the end of my workday. Furthermore, I’d learned an important lesson earlier in the day. Accordingly, this time around I parked in a different area and fed the meter to take me through the end of my scheduled workday.
Somehow I got tied up for an extra hour at my internship, and, completely forgetting about the meter, left work to discover that I had incurred yet another parking ticket.
Turns out, the same bastard ticketed me again. Upon further, further reflection, I despise meter maids.
– Collin “Biermeister” York