Parking woes

One of the inconveniences of living in Midtown is that we have restricted parking.  On one hand this is good because if you do not have a permit you can't park on the street for more than two hours at a time. This basically means that if you do have a permit when you come home there will be a place to park because there won't be a lot of other people who are using it as a commuter stop parked in front of your house.

And this is important because none of us have garages or even driveways.

The other side of the coin, however is that every two years we have to go through a bureaucratic nightmare to get the damn parking pass.

To get a parking pass you must submit to the City a copy of the car registration, a copy of a bill which has been sent to your home with your name and the address where you want the parking permit to be issued, and a properly filled out form.  

This doesn't sound particularly difficult, unless you get your bills online.

When you get your bill online it generally comes in the form of an email and does not look like a regular bill. They will also accept as proof the copy of your bank statement. Oh yeah, like I would like the City to have a nice copy of my bank statement.

This requirement is all the more ridiculous when you consider that the City also bills us for the utilities, so we shouldn't have to give more than an account number for them to be able to click one button and see our bill.  

Six weeks ago, I sent in my properly filled out form, a copy of my car registration, and the closest thing I could find on the Internet to a bill.  I mailed it off, and we left for Canada.  

When we got home, There was a letter stating it wasn't the right thing.  

After a lot of grief, I finally found a page where I could get an actual copy of the bill, bullied and cajoled my ancient computer to print out one miserable copy, and mailed it in.  

And waited.  And waited.  As of today, it has been a month since I sent it in, and the old permit expired at the end of August.

So I walked over to City Hall to see what the problem was, because god knows you can never get anybody on the phone.  

But I got there at 11:30, and they don't open til 12:30.  I went off on another little walk --gotta get those miles in-- and came back at 1pm.  

Here's what the line looked like when I got there.  

After about 20 minutes I mad it up to the desk where I was given a number and allowed to go into the Kafka memorial waiting room.  In this room people have numbers like a bakery, except they are somehow computer generated and don't come up in any particular order.  

In another 15 minutes, I finally got up to the window.  At this point the clerk asked if I had brought the information with me.  (Why should I?  I mailed it in.) I gave her the long explanation about the difficulty of finding the website with the bill on it, the difficulty of making the damn printer print it, the long wait, everything else, and she was nice enough to go back and look for my paperwork.  

And surprise, it was there.  After a month, nobody had even started to process it.  This clerk was nice enough to process it and give me my permits.  

After an hour total, I finally walked out with a parking permit.