College and Parking Tickets

I saw this article the other day, and it made me smile. Barack Obama had to pay about $375 for old parking tickets from when he attended Harvard. To be honest, the University of Montevallo would likely hunt me down if they could. College and parking tickets go hand and hand like peanut butter and jelly.

It's mostly because many colleges have massive shortages on parking space. Just ask any student. Then there are restrictions that only apply during the week, like teacher parking spaces. I used to park my Ford Taurus (RIP) in some spaces just outside my dorm during the weekend and then forget to move the car to another lot on Sunday nights. On Monday mornings, there was a fresh new ticket on my windshield. I'm sure that the University made enough money off of me during my freshman year to grant a full scholarship to the soccer player of its choice.

Thankfully, these tickets don't usually go on your driving record. Most of the students would have lost their licenses if they did. I've only had one real traffic ticket, and I've often told the stories of the Coffee County cop who pulled me over in Enterprise back in 1999. I started to pass, and the line was dotted. When I finished the pass, the line had just turned solid. Technically, I was in the clear. But my idiot boyfriend was drunk and had a six-pack on him (the beer, not the belly). Turns out, Coffee County was a dry county and we were technically smuggling beer, regardless as to whether or not I knew that Coffee County was dry. (I thought I was being responsible by being a designated driver.) So I sucked it up and took the traffic ticket instead of getting my butt arrested.