Our inner anarchists had planned a revolt this morning: we were going to purposefully set ourselves up to have our vehicles ticketed by The Man so we could stage a little protest and make some noise.

The City of North Vancouver appears to have an astronomical budget for city maintenance, as they clean our street twice a week, every week. As nice as it is to have clean streets (which were never really all that dirty to begin with), it is an enormous pain in the ass to have to scramble to move our collection of vehicles twice each week before the street cleaners get there. The Coming of the Sweeper is always preceded by a visit from The Man – he goes around and writes a parking ticket for each car on the side of the street being cleaned on that particular day. Every week like clockwork – they work the far side of the street, then the near. If you didn’t move your car or find alternate parking, that’ll be $30 please. We’ve all been ticketed more times than we can count, although we do make an active effort to remember the stupid rules and move ourselves accordingly.

The City must have dug a little deeper and found some more money, because they’re curbing our street and installing sidewalks along the far side for the entire block. This kind of sucks because a) it’ll reduce the width of our street which is already over-populated with ridiculously large trucks that speed down the road on huge tires, and b) they’re sidewalking *nothing* – there are no houses across the street for half the block, and the other half is a parking lot for an apartment complex. It’s a huge waste of money for some pretty unnecessary work, and I’m not looking forward to the even more complicated parking situation it will inevitably generate.

While they’re doing this work, they’ve roped off the far side of the street for work. This has eliminated 50% of our parking, meaning unless you get home early or just never move your car, you’ll have nowhere to park. We thought that surely they would skip the street cleaning this week – after all, they’ve blocked off half our street. Where would we park? And if they DID try to clean the streets, why we would just leave our cars and scooters where they were – what were they gonna do, ticket the whole lot of us?

That’s exactly what they were gonna do, actually. As I was getting ready for work this morning I glanced outside and saw the SUV of The Man. He was pulled in behind Oscar, and his ticketing machine was out. We were going to get ticketed, even though there was nowhere else to go. Strangely enough, I was more elated than annoyed – sweet! They really ARE that stupid! We could stage our protest and fight The Man, The City, and all the draconian policies contained therein!

It didn’t happen, though. An angel in a hardhat saw The Man, and while he was writing Oscar’s ticket, she intervened. I don’t know the details of their conversation, but if there is any common sense and justice in the world, she pointed out the fact that there was extremely limited parking due to the construction so it would be a little unfair to penalize us further when there was really nowhere we could go. Whatever she said, it worked – when I finally left the house, there were no tickets on any of our cars or the cars of other people who had no other options.

I’m a little sad that I don’t get to stage my protest, though. Perhaps I will picket something out of spite.

Hey hey! Ho ho! Those lime green pants have got to go! Hey hey! Ho ho! The left turn signal on Pender and Burrard isn’t long enough and it makes me cranky to have to sit at the light for 3 complete cycles before I can go!

The 60’s would be so proud.

obey. or else.