Much cheapness

It never ceases to amaze me how cheap some people can be. How much will fifty pence (50% of a pound sterling) buy you nowadays? Not a hell of a lot. Maybe a chocolate bar and a bit. A pint or two of milk. Less than that in some emporia.

My question comes from the two rather flash looking motors I booked today without pay and display tickets. Let’s look at the sums; you buy a car priced at £30-50,000, then don’t bother with a measly 50p pay and display ticket. Do they really want a Parking ticket? Is it some act of bravado against ‘the system’? Is it perchance one of those one up-manship things where they deliberately want to get penalised so they have something to complain about at posh dinner parties?

“It was frightful my dear, that nasty parking warden put one of his awful tickets on my car.”
“How utterly beastly for you darling.”
“How dare he, I mean, couldn’t he see it was a Range Rover Vogue? Horrid little man. Just because I wouldn’t buy one of those ugly display ticket thingies.”
“Yes, all Traffic Wardens should all be hanged from the nearest lamppost. Vultures, that’s all they are, vultures.”
“Just another one of Gordon Browns ghastly stealth taxes.”
“It’s disgusting. We shouldn’t have to pay for parking. After all, we do pay our council tax.”
“Only when our accountants can’t write it off on a technicality darling.”

And so on, etc. I’ve actually had some plummy voiced persons stand there (Post parking ticket) and argue vehemently that because they are a taxpayer (When their accountants can’t wangle it as a tax dodge); they (and only they) should have free car parking. I couldn’t agree less; even if their permit was a residents pass from one of the posher London suburbs, so what? It wasn’t valid in my car park.

In the face of such blatant provocation I just stood there with a politely ironic cocked eyebrow and tried hard not to let my traitorous mouth vouchsafe “What an unmitigated twat you are” at them. It’s bad enough having to deal with all the low-life’s trying to piss around with the regulations I’m paid to enforce, but when it’s someone who takes the ‘moral high ground’ when they are so obviously in the wrong – my sympathy quotient bottoms out. Fifty lousy pence. How cheap can you get?

Not only that, it’s the double standard that annoys the bejasus out of me. Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Punish him, not me, officer. It’s like I’m being treated as their personal servant. As if I were not a human being.

As I have often made clear; I do not care about conspicuous wealth, or lack of it. My business is impartial enforcement. Yet sometimes there is quiet satisfaction when I make an entrance to a car park and all I can hear is the grumble of guilty engines starting.