When you work downtown, getting parking tickets is sometimes almost unavoidable. It’s almost part of your monthly budget.

What would you do if the tickets had a one-week due date and a large penalty for being late?

That’s what the woman in this story had to deal with, but she found a great way to get back at what she thought was an unreasonable rule.

Let’s check it out.

Parking Payment Compliance

I worked downtown where there wasn’t any long-term parking within two blocks of my building.

There were two-hour meters I would use for short stops at the office maybe three or four times a week.

That’s annoying, but no big deal I guess.

Inevitably once a month or so, I would get a ticket because something came up at the office and I couldn’t get back to my car in-time.

The tickets are only $15, but you only have a week to pay and then they would be $45.

What a hassle.

At the time, there was no option for online or web payment, so a check had to be mailed in.

Most of the time I would get it paid in time, but I hated it when the fee would triple.

I basically just considered this the cost of doing business downtown.

I was also very frustrated that there was such short timeframe for payment and response on my part.

Most interactions from the city took months for the city to respond/resolve (my job involved working with the city regularly).

I had previously asked if I could just set up an account and keep a running balance, but they said no.

That’s a simple way to avoid the late fees.

After about 5 years of this, I decided to set up an auto bill pay with my two vehicle license plates in the memo line and it would send every two weeks to ensure that if I accidentally got two in a month, I was covered.

Never again would I have to pay the $45.

I guess this caused quite the headache for the parking department.

Hey, that sounds like their problem.

After about four months of automatic bill payments, and them sending me back the checks that did not have any ticket to apply, I got a phone call requesting that I stop as it required a lot of research on their part and a commissioner had to sign for each check they had to send back.

I asked again if I could have an ongoing ‘account’ to avoid the accidental $45 fee, and they said I could not.

So I continued sending them automatic payments for about three years after that until I changed jobs.

That is a perfect solution to a very annoying problem!

Take a look at what some of the people in the comments had to say about it.

Indeed, not often you can out red-tape the government!

Yeah, no surprise here.

Yes! Spread it far and wide.

Yup, maybe this will push them to change their policy.

She really out played the city this time.

If you can’t beat them, join them.

Never more true than in this case.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.