Yeah, that's the ticket.

Let's talk about parking tickets, shall we?

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Karma

Let me tell you about something that happened to me just the other day. I was doing the 2 to 4 PM sweeper route when I came to a car parked on a corner in front of a house. The street sweeper had already gone around the car (the wet tracks were quite obvious) and I pulled up and got out of my vehicle. The car's trunk was open so I knew I didn't have a lot of time as the owner was somewhere nearby. I started to write the ticket when the car's owner came running out of the house screaming something about making a sale (selling something from the trunk of his Beemer, no doubt). I said, "Sir, the sweeper went around your vehicle." From a red and purple face he cried "You're not giving me this ticket." He seemed to be full of rage - steroid rage from the looks of his upper body, but that's just a guess. He stood blocking my view of his license plate and as I stepped to one side to get a look at it, he pulled a small blanket from his trunk and wrapped it around the plate. I immediately called for back-up. Why? Well, the guy was hostile and seemed prone to doing just about anything and, truth be told, I thought he might take a swing at me. Anyway, I stepped to the front of his car to get a look at the front plate. There was none (a violation right there in California) so I bent to look at the VIN or Vehicle Identification Number located on the dashboard. He jumped into the car and put his hand over the VIN so I couldn't read it (I never could have gotten all 17 digits into my cite writer that quickly anyway, but he didn't know that). Then he started the car, gunned the engine, and went racing off around the corner. The blanket whipped off of the plate as he did this but he was moving too quickly for me to get a good look at the numbers.

So he got away with it, right? Wrong! Maybe he didn't get this particular ticket but karma is strict. Something will happen to him down the line due to the cause he made and he'll wonder (or not) why this thing, whatever it is, has happened to him. You see, Man's law is flawed because we are flawed, but the law of karma, i.e. cause and effect, is absolute. It always works. So, Mr. Steroid Rage, you'll see the result of what you did the other day. You probably won't recognize it and I'll never know what happened to you, but don't question it when it occurs. It's just karmic payback at work. And ain't it a bitch?