Parking Enforcement Officers in Harrisburg are the new Hall Monitors from High School.

Or so it seems to me, anyway.

I drive a nineteen ninety Saab 900. It’s got roughly two hundred ten thousand miles on it.

But it gets GREAT gas mileage. I kept track for about five or six tanks and it burns at just about twenty eight miles per gallon.

But it has lots of little bruises. The interior light just DOESN’T WORK. The heated seats gave up heating a long time ago. The passenger side seat belt doesn’t click in to the place that you click it in. Sometimes, something underneath the dashboard makes a dull high-pitched “rrrrreeeeeeeeewwwww” kind of noise. And the turn signal arm doesn’t stay on when I make a right hand turn. But the turn SIGNAL works; I just have to hold the signal arm when I’m turning.

And for that last reason, my car failed the mechanical part of the inspection. Emissions passed with flying colors (shouldn’t that be the more important one anyway?) but I didn’t get two new stickers.

Only one.

So for the past couple of months, I’ve been driving around with one valid and one expired inspection sticker.

I DID have my mechanic check it out–and he told me it’d cost around five hundred bucks to get it working again. (But that’s pretty much his answer for EVERY repair on this thing)

So I decided to let it go–considering I only PAID five hundred for the car.

But I digress…

Heading up Maclay to Cameron last Wednesday, I got pulled over by a Harrisburg cop. After giving him my insurance, registration and drivers license (show us your papers) he informed me that I was pulled over because one of my two inspection stickers was expired.

After coming back from running my info through the system, he handed me a citation. I immediately launched into a very animated explanation of WHY my sticker is still expired. (There’s NO WAY I’m paying the same amount to fix a thing that’s been KINDA broken since I bought the car that I paid FOR the car. Call me kooky…but it doesn’t make much sense. All for a stupid sticker anyway)

But back on topic–

I parked too close to the corner on Thursday night and wound up getting another parking ticket. But not only did I get another parking ticket, the Parking Enforcement Officer decided to take a yellow marker (like the kind they use in a used car lot to write the price on the windshield) and drew a HUGE YELLOW SQUARE around my expired inspection sticker. And then, the Parking Enforcement Officer drew a HUGE YELLOW ARROW from about the middle of my windshield down pointing at the BIG YELLOW SQUARE he drew around the inspection sticker.

WHAT?

WHAT the…?

I was DUMBFOUNDED. I couldn’t believe they would DO something like that!

C’mon…that CAN’T be standard protocol, right? Are they ALLOWED to do that?

Because it seems pretty childish, if you ask me.

It’s like the little lowly parking enforcement officer who didn’t quite make it ALL THE WAY through the academy and wound up in the purgatory of security guards and actual police officers and tattles on the lawbreakers.

“No running! And are you chewing gum? Mrs. Anderson! I stopped Jimmy from running in the hall AND he’s chewing gum!”

Hey, I’m not saying I shouldn’t have gotten a parking ticket.

And I’m not arguing the fact that the reason that my car failed inspection is LAME at best.

Nor am I bitching about getting a ticket for not resolving the inspection sticker issue on my windshield to begin with.

What I’m saying is–doesn’t it seem a bit EXTREME for a parking enforcement officer to do something like that?
But hey, I guess with the current state of financial affairs the city is in, they’ve become the main breadwinners for King Reed.

All’s fair, right?