4th Journal - Masa

Her story about getting parking tickets made me want to talk about my experience. I have never gotten a parking ticket and violated the Road Traffic Law. So my record is still clear. What surprised me about parking when I came to Hawaii was that there were so many coin parking meters and police sniffing around to bust violators’ butts. One day, me and my friend went to an office to have a sort of business meeting and we parked at a coin parking space. We thought that the meeting would take us only 40 minutes, so we used 6 quarters. Unexpectedly, the meeting lasted an hour. When we got out of the meeting that the office was in, we found a police officer writing a ticket. We told her that we were going to leave. I was sure that the officer just started to write the ticket. She hadn’t even completed filling blanks on the ticket. I knew that the meter had just expired because I had timed the parking time with a stop-watch on my phone. But she didn’t let us go. Nothing was easier than imagining her having waited for the meter to expire in front of it.