when it rains it pours

this is rain in LA. (Look closely.)

In Los Angeles rain is rare, but when it does it comes like a waterfall.  Within minutes the streets become rushing rivers, parking lots become great lakes, and television channels are interrupted with warnings of flash floods.

Not long after our Vegas trip Jaime and I received a series of parking tickets from the ruthless iron fisted LA municipal parking police.  They can start out at $50 a pop and double when they go unpaid after the deadline.  Which makes sense because if you don’t have $50 today then it is much more likely that you’ll have $100 tomorrow, right?

Following the parking tickets Jaime discovered that LAMILL would be changing how employees collected tips.  Instead of individuals collecting tips on an individual basis, they would be pooling them and splitting them evenly.  For those of you who have not worked in the restaurant industry, for waiters who are less then stellar the pooling system is great.  For good waiters like Jaime who work hard and make their customers happy the pooling system can cause you to take a big hit in what you take home at night.

I was also having difficulties, struggling to scrape together at least thirty hours a week at Borders.  The writers strike had just ended in mid February and the hope was that there would be an exodus of guild writers going back to their jobs.  Unfortunately the four month strike turned out to be the death of many productions.  Shows that had been getting by on just the skin of their teeth got axed and there wasn’t an immediate need for tons of writers.

All of this was hardly enough to handle, but one morning while on break at work I got a call from Jaime.  I could tell from the worried tone of her voice that I was not going to like what she had to say.  She started with,

“You know how they say, ‘when it rains it pours?’”  To my knowledge no one has ever followed that sentence with, “well, I found $5 on the sidewalk then twenty minutes later I found a brief case with $5 million.”  Instead Jaime told me that she got a traffic ticket on her way home.

What happened was this:

After dropping me off at work Jaime was on her way back to the apartment when she stopped at a three way intersection outside a school.  If you’ve seen the Hangover you know what school I’m talking about.  It’s the one in the beginning, where we’re to believe that Bradley Cooper is a teacher.  What the movie doesn’t show you is that there is no parking lot for parents to wait and before and after school the place is an absolute mad house.

The intersection in question can easily be eight cars deep in all directions.  There are no crossing guards and kids stream into the crosswalk in a constant flow.  When it was Jaime’s turn to go, a pair of kids play fighting on the opposite side stumbled into the crosswalk.  They weren’t crossing and they weren’t near Jaime so she went.  About a block later a cop flipped on his lights and siren and pulled her over.

It was a bullshit ticket, for bullshit reasons, but the whole event was made worse by three factors.  The first was that we still had Washington plates, which as a resident you have two weeks to change.  The second was that she still had a Washington drivers license which also needs to be changed.  The third was that, while we had car insurance, our card was expired and we had no proof of current legitimate insurance.

He wrote Jaime up for not stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk and expired car insurance.  He must have felt bad for her or could see the little back rain cloud following our car because he gave her a break on the license and the plates.  The ticket total was still nearly $1000, but he explained that it would be reduced significantly if she took her proof of insurance down to the court house.

By the time the ticket was due we had even more bad luck as our car broke down and had to be taken to the service shop to fix what ended up being five major problems that would occur immediately after moving to LA.  It felt like the cloud would never lift and we would wash away.

After it the rain LA’s dirt and dust covered wasteland begins to sprout green, the smog temporarily lifts and for a least a little while Angelinos appear to be happy and less self centered.

The ticket ended up costing us about $300, the parking tickets were paid and my parents generously paid for the car repairs.  While my situation a Borders would never get better, the tips situation at LAMILL did get better and soon Jaime was bringing home something resembling a livable wage.  It was a lesson to us, as long as you can sit back and wait out the rain the other side is always a bit greener.