Just a suggestion...

If you're the sort of person who can't help driving through an accident zone and shouting obscenities at the people involved and the officers handling the mess, it's probably not a good idea to do it less than two miles from where you habitually park illegally. And as dumb an idea as that is, doing it while driving a tricked-out brightly-painted SUV with a personalized vanity tag is just plain ignorant.

A fella here did that to a few of my co-workers last week. It was rude to say the least. And later that day, one of the officers involved happened to see the undeniably distinctive vehicle parked in a two-hour metered zone and the meter was expired. Cost to the loudmouth: $50.00.

But it gets better. The next day, the same officer found it parked at an expired meter again. CHING! Another $50.00.

We discussed this at roll call and deduced that the driver works at one of the nearby businesses and is one of the many local workers who roll the dice every day by parking in the metered spots and gambling that they won't get more than a ticket or two every month. (As long as they think it's cheaper than paying for legal parking every day, many people will do this and just accept a few tickets as their unofficial parking fee.)

To be honest, a main reason that this works is because most of us have better things to do with our time than cruising meter parking and handing out parking tickets every day. But this guy...he's become a day-shift project now and it's a game to see who can find him and tag him first on any given morning.

He just got his fifth parking ticket this morning and some of us are wondering how long it's going to take him to figure it out and either pay to park in a garage, take public transit to work, or start driving another car--one that we don't automatically recognize on sight.