Parking Violations Are Obnoxious

I'm probably going to go on a bit of a rant here so I'll apologize ahead of time. Last weekend I got a parking violation for parking in a "no parking" zone. I got the ticket while at a game at Hinkle Fieldhouse. For those of you who haven't been there, it is surrounded by residential buildings in the middle of Indianapolis. I saw one parking lot and it required a tag to park in it. Otherwise, there were no other places to park except the street. Some of the streets did have "No Parking" signs and I avoided parking on those streets. However, the street I parked on had no indication that you couldn't park there. No signs at all. And apparently none of the other 15 drivers who had parked on the street with me saw any signs either. They all got tickets too for parking in this "No Parking" zone. The ticket was bogus to begin with. If they didn't want people to park along that street, put up a sign. It's that simple.

The ticket cost $40 but if I paid within 7 days it would only cost me $20. So I went to the website and a disclaimer came up that said it could take up to 7 days for a ticket to show up on-line. How convenient that the ticket doesn't show up on the web until after the discount deadline. I checked the website for 5 days and nothing showed up so I gave up on that route of payment and tried to call. Of course it was a stupid computer menu that I was talking to. It kept asking me for a number that was on the ticket but wasn't labeled so I had no idea which number it wanted. And every time I pressed zero to be connected to a real person I got cut off. I tried 4 or 5 times and got cut off every time. At this point I gave up and decided that I was going to have to go downtown to pay off the ticket in person. So I drove out of my way to downtown, paid $5 to park for 10 minutes, got charged $1.50 processing fee to use my credit card, let the lady know what I thought of their terrible system, and went on with my day. It would have been great if they would have just labeled the street in the first place and I would have avoided the entire situation.