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I hope you will forgive me for taking a week off from this weekly grind to actually do some work. I had to make my yearly trip to the city that the mouse built, Anaheim, to spend three days at the NAMM Show; a yearly trade show for the music industry. Thank god it only comes once a year. While it is not as boring as most trade shows, as it progresses, the attendees become more and more bizarre in their appearance.
It can be quite a shock for a first time attendee, as it was for Hal. A veteran of many a trade show, he couldn’t have been prepared for what I refer to “as the place where the possessed come to mingle.” You see, when you get that many musicians in one place, you always have that faction that comes to this show in full regalia. It goes beyond the usual spiky Mohawks and spandex, it is the one time of year that most of these people are seen in the daylight hours. They pull out all of the stops and make up to make their visual statement and try their best to shock. The show is now over for another year and the children of the night have gone back to wherever they came from.
Now it was time to get back to my daily grind as shuttle pilot for my kids in their daily afternoon routines. As I went about these chores, as I do everyday, there was something different today, and not in a good way.
As all of us do, I follow a certain routine when picking up or dropping off my kids from school. I rarely deviate from my path because that’s the way I like it. If you find something that works, don’t try and fix it. Well somebody, and I will tell you who in a minute, decided that they would try to fix my routine because it obviously wasn’t working for somebody.
My pick-up pattern was established last year when my kids were in their first year at Oak Avenue Intermediate and Temple City High School. Luckily for me the schools are close to one another, well it used to be lucky. The way it used to be was inconvenient to say the least, but at least it was do-able. After picking up my son a block away from Oak I would drop down to Lemon Avenue, which is the street that runs directly in front of the high school where I, along with the majority of parents, pick up their kids.
Most of us parents would pull over and stop on Lemon briefly to wait for our kids, pick them up, and be on our way. This was the only way, coming from either direction, to accomplish this minor task. Sure, the traffic was bad but at least it kept moving. It seems like, as your kids get older, they get a little quicker on their feet so the process moves faster as the school year progresses.
That was until this last Monday. Unbeknownst to others and me the street sign gremlins had been busy at work posting new parking signs that read “No Parking 7AM to 5PM without permit.” What, since when? It wasn’t difficult enough to pick up our kids without making the entire front of the school a no parking zone? Apparently our City Council thought that this was the case.
That’s right. Our distinguished City Council. The ones who don’t screw things up only when they don’t do anything, which they seem to excel at. When they attempt to make changes they always seem to miss the mark or else they provide us with things we don’t need or want. This situation is a prime example. I wasn’t a big fan of previous city councils but since our latest group has been in office I have learned a valuable lesson. Be careful what you wish for. You just may get it.
And get it we did from every direction. Lucky for us two of the biggest stumbling blocks in any forward progression in our city are up for re-election. I’m still thinking about who to endorse but I can guarantee you it won’t be either one of them. I will let you know between now and election time who has, in my opinion, the right stuff.
But back to their latest faux pax. The parking near our high school, and what really tipped me off that something was in the wind. That would be the presence of what some people call “The Tattletales” or as I refer to them as “The Parking Nazis.” They are the Public Safety volunteers that drive around our city in the blue and white vehicles giving out parking tickets, spying on the population, and reporting back to our completely ineffective Code Enforcement department.
On Monday, as soon as I pulled up and stopped on Lemon, out jumped the badge-wearing volunteer carrying a clipboard. He approached every car and wrote down our license plate numbers with an almost giddy look on his face. He could barely contain his excitement. Unless my eyes were deceiving me, I think he was actually drooling at the fact that his new assignment was designed to intimidate every person he approached.
This was further witnessed later on at City Hall. You see, after I dropped my kids off at home and not knowing what to make of his presence at the high school, I decided to see what this guy was up to. I followed him around just to see what he was doing. I watched him drive around the block a couple of more times stopping to straighten the same temporary stop sign at the corner of
Longden and Temple City Boulevards, and then he went back to City Hall. I then watched him share the contents of his clipboard with a couple of different people as they came out of the side entrance of the Code Enforcement office. At this point, he and what I am assuming was a Code Enforcement official shared a good laugh over the contents of his newly formed little list of which I was a part of. Leave it safe to say I was not amused.
Once I got back to my office, I called the Public Safety office at City Hall to see what the deal was, and why a city volunteer was writing down my license plate number. I was informed that there had been new postings on Lemon and that they were collecting information to send out warnings before they started issuing citations. When I asked about the origins of the new postings I was told they were issued by, that’s right you guessed it, the City Council.
Once again, showing if there is a pooch to be screwed, our City Council will find it, and their volunteer Parking Nazi’s need to be told what constitutes parking. I was not parked nor were the two people behind me that he overzealously jotted down on his little list. We were stopped and that is not in violation with what the council’s new signs said. If they didn’t want us to stop then that needs to be on the sign. So unless he was trying to pad his list, shock, or intimidate us, which he obviously was trying to do, his newly collected data is flawed.
I hope all of the parents that are irritated by this latest misstep by our City Council, will remember when the 2nd Tuesday in March rolls around, and vote out two of the people responsible for it. That would include all of the parents, who have kids on the softball, water polo, volleyball, basketball, tennis, and all of the other teams, who want to come and watch their kids play and won’t have a place to park. Because the parking lot will be coned off and now there is no parking on the street. Being a part of the Varsity Softball family I know I will remember why we don’t have more people attending our games and lay the blame where it originated.
As to our Parking Nazis, if you want to shock or intimidate, try a Mohawk, some make up, and spandex.
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