Parking Ticket

Well, yesterday I stayed at my apartment for the whole day. I was sleeping in my room the whole morning while the outside temperature surge to the nineties. It was a very hot day outside.

At 4 pm I woke up and prepared my lunch for work. I meticulously packed my lunch inside my lunch bag then started to iron my uniform after that. I was in a pretty good mood when I woke up preparing myself for that night's work.

After taking a shower I put on my uniform, carefully blow-dried my hair, put on an ample amount of mousse to contain my hair a little bit and to keep it quitely controlled, and sprayed a little of my A&F Fierce cologne. Then I readied myself to leave the house.

When I got out of the lawn where I parked my beige Toyota Avalon car I saw a white envelope on the windshield. It was a parking ticket left by some fierce parking enforcer citing that I violated the Los Angeles parking regulation by parking my car in the front lawn.

In my eight months of my stay in my new apartment where I frequently parked on the front lawn most of the time, I just received a parking ticket of this kind of charge. When I came over in this place my landlord told me that it is okay to park in the front lawn and I've been doing that eversince.

It was unfortunate yesterday that my car was spotted and was issued the ticket at 2 pm when I was soundly sleeping and heavily snoring in my room.

That means to say that my landlord didn't even know what the parking law here in Los Angeles especially in North Hollywood where I lived for more than eight months.

The funny thing is that I don't know how much dollars was being charged because some dim-witted parking enforcer didn't indicate or write down the total charged amount but left a telephone number for me to call and verify how much it will cost me.

Only that I found out just this morning that it will cost me a whopping $55.00, for being cited parking on my landlord's front yard. Hahaha. That was enormous and exorbitant. I can buy a 100 ml. A&F cologne for that amount.

When I saw the ticket yesterday I was so mad and devastated. I really didn't know that it was a violation because I've been parking there eversince I moved in here eight months ago. Now I know that it was a violation, if not with the ticket I've got.

It is really true that ignorance of the law is no excuse. And what had happened to me yesterday was a clear example of this. How should I know it. Even my landlord encouraged me to park there. Then maybe I have to blame him for the citation. Hehehe.

It wass clear that this is a grave mistake and a big lesson for me. Now I have to be aware and careful of parking anywhere.

Those parking enforcers seems like hungry vultures popping anywhere to collect and extort money from the ignorant people like me. Or they were just doing their sacred and precious job with dedication and diligence. Or they just needed to collect money in order to be well compensated. Or I was just sour-graping because of my dire ignorance.

I've been to a lot of situations like this before where I received a lot of parking violations because of a lot of reasons and excuses.

There were some times that I was cited because I parked on the street where residents on that place need to secure or procure a permit from the city to park on the street. That time I didn't have a resident parking permit then I was cited for a parking offense.

There's this situation where I parked on a metered-parking in Melrose Avenue where I left my car to buy a shirt from a nearby store. I was just late for a few seconds then when I came back there was this white envelope flapping on my windshield citing me for a parking overtime.

And there's this situation where I parked on the street to visit a friend at his apartment. Unknowingly, I didn't know that it was street cleaning day at the time when I parked my car on the side street, then when I come back there's this white envelope again telling me that I made another parking violation.

And many more parking offenses I cannot recall. Maybe I invested thousands of money already for the county of Los Angeles for just a slight mistake of parking my car.

Eventhough how careful I am in evading the citations still luck is not on my side. Maybe sometimes shit happens to make life a little miserable. There I can feel that life is not that perfect at all.

All I can say is that maybe carefulness and cautiousness is the twin of bad luck. Not really.... but maybe sometimes. That's just my idea. You can prove me wrong but maybe in my case, I am right and it happened to me 10% most of the time. Well, people are different anyway.

This means that being unfortunate with what we do, sometimes happen and is inevitable. Life could be boring if we don't have this adversities to learn upon.