Chan's Personal Blog

One morning, as my parents were leaving for work, and heading towards their car, they see a guy standing there. It appears to be a guy writing a parking ticket right in front of our house. That's odd. My dad approaches the guy and asks what he's doing. The guy is writing a ticket for blocking a driveway.

Now at our house, we have two driveways. One of the driveways we don't use because it's on a steep slant, so my parents park their car on the street. Sometimes in our neighbourhood, there's too many cars parked on the road, so my parents have to park in front of the unused driveway.

In either case, the guy lectures my dad about how you can't block driveways, and you have to park a metre away from it. My dad then argues that this is OUR driveway, and we're not blocking anyone since no one ever uses the driveway. The guy fires back saying that the city owns the driveway, and therefore the by-laws apply to that driveway, and if we had a problem, take it to city hall. The guy hands my dad a ticket for $15 and leaves.

Naturally, my dad goes down to city hall to dispute this ticket. The lady at the complaint desk doesn't budge on the ticket, and says that if you want to dispute the ticket, you'd have to go to court which will take six months before a court appearance. Six months? Forget that. So my dad grudgingly pays the fine.

I think this fine is ridiculous. I can understand how this by-law would be useful if some random person blocked your driveway. Fair enough. But we're blocking our own driveway that no one uses anyway. No one is affected by this, so why should we be fined?

What's even stranger is, why is a parking guy patrolling our neighbourhood? We live well out of the downtown area, and I only picture parking ticket guys making their rounds in the downtown core, not a suburb.

This weekend, I did my famous Christmas shopping blitz. When I go Christmas shopping, it is a tactical military operation and we take no prisoners. I finished in record time this year, as it took exactly two hours at the mall, and then we hit the extraction zone. In either case, I would have finished even earlier if it wasn't for the vultures at Future Shop. Read on to see why Future Shop is the newest addition to my black list.