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Parking authority weighs in on campus situation

Posted on Aug 30, 2010 in Opinion

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Tired amusement threaded with disgust is perhaps the best way to describe my reaction upon reading a recent Kaleidoscope piece, which expressed the UAB Director of Parking and Transportation’s promise to create more parking options for students by opening a new deck on 12th Street.

A new deck isn’t the answer – it’s improving the availability of existing decks and lots, which are closed at least half the time for either maintenance or some university-sponsored social shindig bearing little or no relevancy to the average student on a class schedule.

While there is no mention of it in the article, frustratingly limited access is the complaint I often hear – a complaint usually sandwiched between the finer points of why I’m a loser, or a punk, or a creep, or a complete affront to society on those too-frequent occasions when I’m being verbally castrated by a student who’s less than pleased with the warning I’ve slipped under his or her windshield wiper.

My job is enforcing the city private-parking ordinance for a business duplex located here on campus. To ensure adequate parking for our customers, I’m paid to aggressively discourage by issuing warnings or tickets, or by towing students who have parked in the adjoined lots and skipped off to class.

And while you should note my use of the word “aggressively”, you should also note that, in the seven years of my employ, I have been unquestionably lenient in my choice of penalty for those who break the law, having never once booted or towed a vehicle.

I very rarely even give out tickets. Usually, I just slide a warning under your wiper if I fail to stop you from leaving the lot on foot.

I’m lenient because I’m sympathetic, and I’m sympathetic because I graduated in 2005 from the same school you now attend, so I’ve walked in your shoes. A country-mile, to be fair.

However, serving as your own personal verbal whipping-post for most of the decade has severely diminished my capacity for such leniency.

Maybe that’s because I’ve been flipped off too many times. Or maybe it’s because I’m incessantly martyred by your guilt trips about how I’m ruining your GPA by making you late for your exam through my refusal to allow you to park.
Or maybe it’s this silly cat-and-mouse game I have to play every shift with those of you who believe either that I’m stupid or it’s only my second day on the job.

The promises made in the Kaleidoscope article are empty ones, as they have been since the first time I stepped onto this campus back in 2000.

I know this for a fact, because my job is one of necessity, a need created by a combination of two things: the collective apathy of the UAB student body (an apathy to which I can readily attest as both a former student and reporter for the Kaleidoscope), and a university administration more interested in fluff and social aesthetics (e.g., the recent completion of the student-fee-fueled Campus Recreation Center and Commons, not to mention the “Alumni Center” currently being erected across from the library) than the academic success of the student (which does include being able to regularly find a parking space on campus).

However, the latter only exists because of the former. This university has a busted priority-meter only because the student body unwittingly endorses it with its collective I-could-care-less-about-what-happens-five-feet-outside-my-sphere-of-influence mentality.

You have no problem shooting the messenger because I’m convenient and ready-made, a modicum of instant gratification on which you can expend your mounting frustration over the lack of parking on campus.

But when it comes to actually tackling the real object of that frustration by addressing your concerns en masse to the administration … well, I guess that’s just too much work for you, isn’t it?

So the next time you’re verbally fuming over one of my parking warnings, or flipping me off, or calling me a slew of names reserved only for your worst of mortal enemies, or ominously promising to return with “friends” to “take care of the situation” (actual recent quote), or searching for choice words of ridicule even though you’re merely passing by on the sidewalk, remember this:

The joke’s actually on you.

You are, after all, the reason I have this job in the first place.

Email: citizenrogue@aol.com

 

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