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Once again I must report that we have lost a battle on the Brookline parking front. Last night when Sarah and I returned from Matt and Kate's at about 9 PM we discovered that we were unable to enter our normal parking space because the entrance to the driveway was covered with two feet of snow. This didn't stop us from trying to park the car in the driveway in an attempt to create the equivalent of a beached whale out of the Passat before deciding that it wasn't a wise move and to seek alternative parking on the street.

My idea was that the city would be perfectly understanding of our hardship given the storm and would be understanding of our parking on Alton Place, the side street next to our condo. So I talked Sarah into plowing her car into the snow bank on the side of the road so that we could go inside and watch iRobot before it got too late to do so.

This morning when we first slept in to about 9:30 and then Sarah, who couldn't sleep because she kept worrying about the car and potential problems like towing, tickets, and general disdain from town clerks, made the executive decision that it was time to dig out the car. I looked at the mound of snow that was once the Passat and I started in with a smug grin as I saw that there was no way for a Brookline police officer to affix a ticket to the vehicle. Sarah took a more logical approach and started to brush off the car to find not a standard Brookline $30 overnight ticket but a ticket for $50 that had been slapped on the Passat at 8:30 AM because a Snow Emergency had been declared.

So I spouted off about how we could get our money back from the people who manage the parking space because it wasn't cleared. We dug the car out until the cheap shovel that had been a Carvey family practical present last year broke at the end and we decided we could escape from the space by driving out of it. So we drove down to the street to the parking space since we had to put the car somewhere.

As we entered the driveway an older Indian woman and her son were shoveling the driveway by hand. I saw it as a great opportunity to confront them and to get our $50 back. So I told them about the trouble we had the night before and she informed me that they try as hard as they can during the snowstorm but the plough that cleared the driveway at 7:00 didn't come back until 10:00 PM and that had I called her she would have given me instructions for when we could park the car after it was re-ploughed. She was also curious how we were sub-letting a parking space and instructed me to call the people who were renting me the space and in the future to call when I have a problem since they try as hard as they can. So I realized that I could bitch out the people who rent the space to me only to piss them off and lose my space because I was too dumb to call about the ploughing schedule or fight the ticket at city hall. I thought I should take my chances with the city although the nice Indian woman hard at work shoveling the driveway for us told us that in general the city doesn't care what your problem is. They just want our taxes and parking tickets.

I figured I had a chance to fight the ticket since there were no signs declaring that I couldn't park on a side street in a snow emergency. So I looked online to see where and whether a snow emergency had been posted. Unfortunately the policy in Brookline, as expected, is that during a snow emergency no car can be parked on any street without the wrath of getting a $50 ticket. All good citizens are instructed to call a phone number to determine if the city has declared that you will need to pay an additional stupidity tax for not calling.

So Sarah will pay the $50. It isn't fair but life sucks. The only other option left to solve the problem of Brookline parking is the real solution. No, not global thermonuclear war. The answer is to move to a city other than Brookline that can't afford to hire an elite crew of ticket pushers. Some day I'll defeat those evil robots. Oh Yoshimi.