A lot of cities do not have convenient parking.

The parking lots may be too expensive or too far from where you’re trying to go, or there simply may be too many cars and too few spaces to be able to park legally.

In today’s story, one employee accepts her fate of getting the occasional parking ticket.

What she does not accept is getting fees added to the parking tickets.

Let’s see what she does about it.

Parking Payment Compliance

This was quite a few years ago.

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.

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 parking tickets weren’t that expensive if you paid them on time.

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

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.

She was pretty frustrated with the city’s hypocrisy.

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

She came up with a plan.

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.

She was asked to stop sending the checks.

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.

She did what she had to do to avoid the parking fees.

Honestly, it seems like the biggest problem here is that there wasn’t very convenient all day parking.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

There’s a method to their madness.

Sharing is caring!

Right, why should she help them?

She should’ve shared this tip with literally everyone!

Another person thinks the city could get malicious.

Nobody likes paying late fees!

I mean. Duh.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.