I just couldn't make anyone happy today.

So I'm driving along, minding my own business, and this guy in front of me tosses a cigarette butt out of his window right in front of me.

That's a big pet peeve of mine--it's filthy, disrespectful, and a fire hazard all in one. On go the lights. He went away with a hundred dollar consolation prize, and for some reason he was angry at me, even though he's the one who chose to toss his trash on my road right in front of me.

Then there was the woman who wasn't paying attention while driving. She spun her car out and took out a big road sign and shut down a major roadway at rush hour. I handed her a ticket for failure to maintain control, and she got mad too, but not quite as mad as the other woman who tried to zip around the long line of cars backed up prior to the wreck by driving at least half a mile on the shoulder, only to have me pluck her right out of the traffic flow after she saw me standing on the shoulder ahead of her and forced her way back into the traffic lane. She got two tickets--one for driving on the shoulder and another for cutting off a truck to dive back in as part of her unsuccessful effort to avoid the first ticket.

"Well how is anyone supposed to get to work?" she screamed.

Well lucky for you, I'm already at work. Sign here, please.

Then there was the people in the office building next to a municipal parking lot. The lot is specifically for visitors, not commuters, and that's why the lot has three-hour meters on every spot. I got a call from the lot manager about the lot being full of commuters so I went in and of course almost all of the meters were expired because the commuter cars had been there longer than three hours so I sighed and started writing. As soon as someone in the office looked out and saw me, word spread, and suddenly the lot was full of people frantically feeding meters, all from that building.

Pity that they didn't seem to know that it's also a violation to repeatedly feed a meter. That three hours? That's a hard limit on how long your car can physically occupy that space, and you can't extend it just by recharging the meter. I just kept writing, and the cars of the people that I saw feeding the meters got tickets for that right along with the ones whose meters were still expired.

Now there's a whole building full of unhappy people. Sorry folks--maybe tomorrow you'll park in your company's own lot and pay whatever they charge and stay out of the city's lot. Then I'll be happy because I won't have to write so many freaking parking tickets.

And then, of course, there was the old man in the Mercedes who got rear-ended at a stop sign by a high school-aged girl. It was just a tap and there was no damage to either car but he was going slightly berserk about it when I drove by and saw them parked alongside the road. I stopped and talked to them and looked at the cars. Not a scuff on either one that I could see. Of course he was sure that his Mercedes now had "hidden damage" and he suddenly wanted a police report even though he already had her insurance company's info. He kept pointing to obviously ancient minor scratches on his bumper and telling me that they were new. He wouldn't accept that there honestly wasn't a mark on the car that wasn't there before and I told him that there was no way that I was taking an accident report. I didn't want to have to hammer the girl with a ticket as she was already in tears, and I just didn't feel like wasting another half an hour getting all of the info, filling out the form, and sketching the scene when there was no injury or damage. So I sent him on his way--unhappy, of course--and then got the girl to run along. Now even I was finally cross.

But then I found a car parked in a handicapped spot in front of a store where I regularly go for coffee. It had no handicapped tag or placard (pet peeve #2) and it was running and unattended (pet peeve #3). That was two more tickets--handicapped parking violation and running unattended at $250.00 each, both of which I eventually handed to the fit and able-bodied young lady about 25 years old who came out of the store with a coffee in one hand and her cell phone in the other just as I was starting to write the second one. Naturally she was unhappy, but I have to confess that it did cheer me up a bit.