Every morning, I drop The Boy off at his daycare downtown. There are a few spaces in the back for us to park while dropping off, but a lot of the time they’re already full when I arrive. Across the alley from the daycare lot is a pay parking lot. Most mornings, it’s only about 1\/4 full and today was no exception. Instead of waiting in the alley, blocking traffic for a new spot, I usually just pull into one of the pay spaces for the 5 minutes that it takes me to get The Boy inside and get back out again. Every once in a while, I get hassled by the Parking Walrus. The Parking Walrus is an overweight older gentlemen with long yellowish-grey hair and a yellowish-grey handlebar moustache in an ill-fitting parking attendant shirt. When I encounter the Parking Walrus, it’s the highlight of my morning. Here’s an example of our exchanges:<\/p>\n
PW (holding a clipbord trying to look authoritative)<\/i>: “You know you have to pay to park here.”
Me: “I know, but I’m just dropping my kid off.”
PW: “This is a pay parking lot.”
Me: “The lot isn’t even a quarter full.”
PW: “This is a pay parking lot.”
Me (seeing this isn’t going anywhere)<\/i>: “Thank you.”
I get in my car and the Parking Walrus shuffles back to his truck to await his next victim<\/i><\/p>\n
It was even more amusing this morning. As I walked out of the daycare, I could see the Parking Walrus holding his clipboard and studying my license plate, immediately my face lit up at the sight of my nemesis. I passed one of the the other dads who was getting into his car. He sarcastically says to me, “Uhoh, you’re going to get written up.” He too has incurred the wrath of the Parking Walrus. I told him not to worry, that I was very familiar with the ways of the Parking Walrus. I would be fine. I’ve taken to parking in his lot as much as I can. The way I figure, we have to give the Parking Walrus something to do each morning or he’d be bored. Who says community service can’t be enjoyable? I’m just doing my part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every morning, I drop The Boy off at his daycare downtown. There are a few spaces in the back for us to park while dropping off, but a lot of the time they’re already full when I arrive. Across the alley from the daycare lot is a pay parking lot. Most mornings, it’s only about […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-8-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fonJ-7r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}