FINES

As a citizen I think these are terrible. I hate them with a passion. But as a Mayor I love them. They are a great source of extra income. And people may not like them, but buddy let me tell you when you get stuck paying a fine for something like parking, you know you are too blame for the fine and can’t squawk too much about it being unfair.

Am I a hypocrite on this subject? Of course. I never claimed to be otherwise did I? Yep and I love every second of sitting down as a Mayor and seeing those monthly reports on the amount of fines our city has collected.

I just wish I could put fines on more things. The kinds of things that people do, but they aren’t illegal. Like asking stupid or ridiculous questions. Man would I make a fortune if I could do that.

Some of the questions ask when they call city hall really are amazing. The other day for example we had this guy who I think was probably calling from some mental ward pay phone and wanted to know if we hired extraterrestrials. Then he also wanted to know if they had to pay for parking their spaceship in a parking space if it didn’t actually touch the ground.

Let me tell you that was one phone call I was glad I didn’t have to answer. And if that was the only one it wouldn’t be so bad. But then we get stuck with people calling us to ask a question related to something to do with the State or Federal Government. Which is made worse by the fact they expect us to be some kind of legal expert on why a given law exists.

Beyond this little annoyance are the questions we get from people who I do wonder if they are using some kind of artificial help when calling. Like the person who called and wanted to know our hours we were opened for Christmas. Or the other person that wanted to know if we were opened all night. Do those questions sound reasonable to you? They sure don’t too me.

Anyway, my idea would be to tack on a fee to the person’s phone bill when they called and asked those kinds of questions. You could hit a button on your phone and that would make the computer send a specials charge to the person’s phone number.

Of course the real beauty would be if the person called to ask about the fee and you could zap them for a second fee for asking about the first one. Now that would really be a plus.

But I’m sure some darn lawyer or activists group would protest because they would suggest we couldn’t prove the person called with a dumb question. Now I ask you is that fair? Well okay, I admit that if I had that button on my phone everyone would get charged that fee.

However I suppose I’ll just have to content myself with those times I can go out with my little “tool” and touch some parking meter with time on it and make it read expired. Er, never mind that part I, er and bye!