Parking Tickets in Hour

I have worked for UPS for over 7 years and have been on the same route for almost the last 5 years. My route is in New York City, in Manhattan, on the prestigious Upper East Side. I drive down beautiful 5th Avenue by Central Park (where some residents are paying as much as $30,000/month to live). I deliver packages to many of the rich and famous including Woody Allen, Michael J Fox, Paul Newman, Katie Couric and many others, including the Mayor himself.

Mike Bloomberg. Manhattan is a small island with 8 million residents and it seems like just as many cars. There is literally no place to legally park so I have to double park. I quickly run into the building, deliver the package and get back to the truck before I get a parking ticket.

My job is to deliver our premium early morning packages. Generally there are just a couple packages per building and the doorman signs for the packages so I’m not blocking traffic and not double parked for more than a minute or so. It’s in and out of the building quick as a ninja, and back to the truck. Usually, I didn’t get many parking violations, maybe about one or two a month.

Sometimes I might go as long as two months without a single parking ticket. And I never got tickets when I worked on a Saturday. But about 2 years age, that began to change. Instead of one or two parking tickets per month, I started getting one or two per week. Over the last year that has now escalated to one or two tickets per day and instead of no tickets on Saturday, I get a ticket EVERY Saturday. Same route, same streets, same time - The only variable is the amount of tickets.

Last Friday, I hit a new record high (or record low, depending on your point of view). 5 parking tickets in 1 hour. FIVE! .In One Hour! .

Written by 5 different traffic cops. (And at $115 bucks a pop, that ain’t cheap). Here's what happened. I returned to my truck within 2 minutes of double parking it, and there was a traffic violations specialist, in the middle of writing my third parking ticket for that day. The traffic cop writing me this ticket, writes me a ticket just about every day, same time - same place.

When he saw me coming he said to me “I love seeing UPS trucks. It’s an easy ticket to write because you guys don’t argue with us and give us a hard time”. I move on and continue delivering packages. About 10 minutes later, I come out a building and there is a female cop writing me ticket #4. I pick up the other 3 tickets, show her and say to her, “This is a new record, 4 tickets in less than an hour”. She apologetically says to me, “I’m sorry.

I didn’t know. You should have said something. Or you should have at least put the tickets on the front of the truck so we could see them”.

I said “Thanks for the tip. I think I’ll try that”. So I go to the next stop, but this time I have the 4 tickets visibly displayed on the front of the truck, tucked in by the windshield.

I exit the building and to my suprise, another traffic violations specialist is writing me ticket #5. I guess he didn’t want anyone to see how many tickets I had, so he picked up the other 4 tickets and folded them all together along with ticket #5, so it only looked like one ticket. C’mon Mayor Bloomberg - Give UPS a break!.

Carl Willoughby has worked as a Computer Programmer for the New England Telephone Company, and a Computer Sales Consultant for SEARS. He writes a daily blog about Money, College and whatever's on his mind at: http://www.StudentLoanDebtConsolidationSite.com