Taxing

Had this blog been in production in the mid to late 1990's it undoubtedly would have been dominated by a litany of parking and parking related complaints. I'm talking total and complete domination. Those parking fairies followed me around college with their ticket books as if I were Orenthal James!

I got $75 tickets for "parking on the lines" when my old behemoth car wouldn't fit inside the lines. A Campus Parking "officer" once gave me a ticket for parking in a fire lane when my car broke down there (and I was sitting in it. In the rain. At 2am. Crying). But my favorite was when I'd return to the car and find it adorned with a ticket for "expired meter" while the meter in question was still fully fed. Once I could have sworn I heard it burp.

With no appeals process in place and no recourse whatsoever, the asshole bastards of Campus Parking acted with disgusting impunity. In fact, at one point during my illustrious college career, I was to pay almost as much to The University of Maryland in parking tickets as tuition. The special exclusive article I wrote for the school paper (an audience of over 35,000) detailing the generalized cruelty and inherent intellectual challenges of the Campus Parking department could certainly have made matters worse, but luckily enough for me, the Campus Parking staff were (and likely remain) not only as stupid as I had depicted but illiterate as well, so I escaped furthering their wrath while furthering my reputation as The Ticket Maven.

As it turns out, had I paid all of the parking tickets that I received nearly a decade ago (and possibly had I also not accused the Campus Parking department of widespread mental retardation in a very public forum), I would have had a nice chunk of cash returned to me this year from the state of Maryland. Instead, my 2006 state tax return was "intercepted" and garnished as if I were Orenthal James.