Park This

When my husband left the house this afternoon, he found a parking citation on the windshield of his car. What????!!!!

We live on a cul de sac. Just fifteen houses on this street. My husband's car was in front of our house. Now, it was indeed facing the wrong way, and many of the other home owners on this street park that way and have been for more years than some of those cops have been on the force.

Now wouldn't you think that the courteous thing to do would've been for that cop to get out of his car and come up and ring our bell this morning? He could've asked us if that was our car. He could've told us that they've started to enforce the parking laws and advised us to turn the car around so it was facing the correct way.

But no. He just wrote out the ticket, put it under the windshield wiper, and went on his merry way. Which was probably driving up and down all the streets of this subdivision, looking for parked cars facing in the wrong direction.

$25 for that parking citation. The check is already made out and I'll mail it in the morning. I hope the City of Houston appreciates our "donation," because that's exactly what I plan to tell the next Deputy who calls our house asking for donations to the Deputy Fund.

I also called our friends and told them to make sure their cars were parked the right way. I called our neighbor across the street tonight because when her husband came home from work he parked his car facing the wrong way. Same way he's been parking his car since he moved here. And the people who owned that house before them parked their car facing the wrong way for all the 28 years they lived on this street.

A simple gesture of common courtesy was all that was needed this morning. I'll tell you one thing about Houston police... they give no warnings. Once they see an infraction, the citation book comes out and they start writing.

As I said... I hope they make good use out of our "donation."