The Parking Ticket

One of the first things I do upon returning home from a long day of work is to check the snail mail that's come. Amongst the mail that came last Wednesday was a little "postcard" from the city of Grosse Pointe Park. It was telling me about a judgement from a no-show on my part for a parking ticket received on the 3rd of this month. I needed to pay $15 ($5 ticket / $10 costs) or eventually the court would turn this matter over to the Secretary of State's office (which would have led to probably led to driver's license suspension leading to creating considerable trouble for my work future).

One problem - I have never been to Grosse Pointe Park (referred to for the rest of this entry as "GPP"). I even had to look this up on the map. BTW it is a suburb just north-east of Detroit.

I called the next morning. I told the lady on the other end of the line I wanted to talk with someone about this post-card I had just received. She asked me for the case number which I gave and placed me on hold for the next few minutes.

She came back and asked me if I was who I was and I said "yes". She said I could go ahead and disregard that note. She must have obtained a lot of information in those few minutes. She started off by telling me the person who wrote the ticket probably has bad handwriting. The ticket writer wrote the letter "L" but it looked more like a "C". She noticed that if you ran a plate check with the letter C in that spot that it came back on a Chevy registered out of Midland even though the ticket was written on a Buick. I'm guessing the lady ran a report on that plate with an "L" and came back with a Buick registered a lot closer to her home town. She was giving me the benefit of the doubt being an out-of-towner.

We exchanged pleasantries and she wished me a Merry Christmas. I then ended my conversation and went on my way to a day of work. I felt a lot better about the whole thing.

Makes you wonder though: how often do people get parking tickets that aren't supposed to due to the fact that ticket takers can't write?

Merry Christmas...