Vivid Memories #11

Originally posted September 11, 2011

When I started college at UMBC in Fall 2002, I had signed up to live in the dorms, but I hated it so I ended up commuting to school. The problem was, if you lived in the dorms you couldn't have a regular parking pass, only a provisional one to park in the satellite parking lot. There was no way I was parking in that lot, because it's a bit off-campus and you need to take a shuttle to campus once you park. I live life on the edge and often arrive within 5 minutes (either before or after) of the start time of whatever it is I'm going to, so having to include a 30 minute shuttle lot detour every day was out of the question.

 

I got lucky for the first month or so (relatively speaking), since I only got 3 tickets for having a provisional pass in a regular parking spot. I still couldn't get a regular parking pass because I was technically an on-campus student and the request to get out of my dorm contract was still being processed, but I still wanted to park in normal, convenient parking spots without the risk of getting a $25 ticket, so I had to think of something else.

I ended up deciding that I would make a counterfeit parking pass.

For reference, here's what a regular UMBC parking pass looked like for the 02-03 school year (it was the real one I ended up getting after they let me out of my dorm contract):


The provisional pass was almost identical, except where it says "STUDENT 2002-2003", there was a black bar and it said "PROVISIONAL STUDENT 2002-2003."

What I ended up doing was taking my provisional pass, scanning it into my computer, carefully editing out the black bar and the "PROVISIONAL" descriptor, and printing my new fake pass onto the heaviest, glossiest photo paper I could find. After cutting out the part where you hang it on your rear view mirror to make it look authentic as possible, I had a fake parking pass.

It worked, and all was well for about another month or so, until I got to my car to go home one day and saw another ticket on my windshield. I read the ticket, and it felt as if the parking cop didn't know what to do since there was no spot on the ticket for "fake parking pass," so they just scribbled down "counterfeit pass" and charged me $100.

I was definitely bummed that my scheme ultimately failed, but fortunately I got let out of my dorm contract pretty soon after that and got a real parking pass.

Here's what my next six years worth of parking passes looked like:

You can see that each year they became progressively harder to counterfeit. I like to think that there's a chance I was responsible for that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

status update about Pizza Hut

Originally posted September 10, 2020 When I was a kid, I had a birthday party with a bunch of my friends, where the first half of it was at Pizza Hut and the second half was at a local arcade called Pinball City, which was in the same shopping center. I remember Mortal Kombat was just released, so this dates it to my 8th birthday in 1993. 
Read more

Vivid Memories #2

Originally posted July 14, 2009 It was 2005 and I was obsessed with the movie Breakin’, the terrible prequel to the often-referenced Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Some of the reason why I watched it over and over was the hilarious cheesiness and some of it was the dancing (which was actually pretty fun to watch), but most of it was the music: it had an awesome soundtrack. Of course since I jumped on the bandwagon 20 years too late, the only ways I could hear the music aside from watching the movie over and over again were to get the soundtrack on vinyl, or on an overpriced ($100+) out of print collectible CD, or by finding a track list and assembling the mp3s from Kazaa or WinMX or whatever crappy Napster replacement was still operational. You can probably guess which one I chose.
Read more