The Meter Maids

New York City was the first, if memory serves, to hire “meter maids”: women who would give out parking tickets, thus freeing police officers for, well, police work. No sense in putting cops out on ticket duty when they could be doing cop work.

This now-standard idea caught on and police policed, while ticketers ticketed. No-brainer … except in Our Fair City. The head of the police union liked his parking enforcement job and convinced fellow officers that criminals would run rampant in the streets, parking violators would violate your children, and police alone could touch the Sacred Parking Summons.

Eventually, after hiring two non-cops, firing two non-cops, re-hiring two non-cops, everything settled down and we rejoined the rest of the country’s municipalities. Peace reigned at last.

Until it turned out the previous mayor’s administration was so messed up nobody had bothered to follow up on the tickets thus issued. Piles of them, large bundles of them, overflowing school auditoriums of them. Well, let’s just say a whole ****load.

Back to the meter maids. All of them, both of them, are guys and there seems to be proof they tend to hang out near the two colleges, as reported in the newspaper’s statistics. You’d think two schools whose budgets and students keep the city afloat would deserve a break. Nah; makes too much sense.