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Parking Ticket

Say you were from Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, or anywhere, really, so long as neither your work nor life required you to spend spend any significant time in either Chicago or Illinois; say you parked in downtown Chicago in such a way that, when Lovely Rita saw your car, she smacked her lips and gloated, “Another half-a-hundred for the city!” and slapped a ticket on the windshield; say you left the city uncertain when or if you would ever return: would you pay the ticket?

 

Comments

It seems to me there are fundamental legal questions that need to be settled first, i.e. can they bite you where you live?

Worst case scenario is that the ticket goes into collection, but in reality it’s few cities that bother with that kind of business for a single parking ticket. So, probably not.

That said, last year K received a notice from the state of NY that she was in default of a ticket for improper taxicab pickup in NYC in 2001. Problem is, she wasn’t in NYC in 2001. That was eventually taken care of, but not without quite a lot of hassle.

L.A. sends its unpaid tickets to collection. I finally paid mine when they got that serious; $100 was a lot of cash for accidentally parking in front a fire hydrant at the In-N-Out near LAX.

I’m betting Chicago sends its tickets to collection, but you can wait and see if they threaten you with that. I don’t think Mayor Daley is gonna let you pull a swifty on him.

from what i heard on the radio on the way to the interview with the school with the literary journal, which has had the fastest turn around so far and called me sunday night to schedule a campus visit (it had to be the shirt/tie combo that the hott medievalist who plays classical guitar liked), anyway, it sounds like the meat-packing town is the kinda town that goes after parking delinquents

I got a ticket in Evanston that I never paid and that they never came after, but I don’t know about the Big Shoulders place. My mother the aspiring deacon said you shouldn’t pay it.

Also, I think the lit journal school is sounding good!

Come to think of it, I think I owe Davenport, IA for having mistakenly parked in front of a hydrant. I still had Arkansas plates and a different car, then, so I don’t know that I’ll ever be hunted down for it.

As for Chicago, though, I’ve been looking: nobody has good things to say. Dammit. I’ll probably end up paying. But it’ll be a while.

I got a parking ticket in Bloomington that I never paid. I was going to pay it, but then I decided I wasn’t going to move to Bloomington after all so I didn’t pay it. That was five years ago, but I haven’t heard anything about since.

My wishy-washy equivocation proved no matter. Our household money Nazi paid up.