It is not a little-known fact that one of the greatest downsides of going to Central is having to deal with the parking. The seniors are somewhat conveniently placed across the street and the juniors are banished to a ragged lot under the interstate, while those who are unfortunate enough to not receive a parking permit have to find their own means of parking near the school. The nearest lot, which is right across Dodge, costs nearly one hundred dollars per month, while surrounding lots cost an average of around fifty. For high school students, this is an absurd amount of money to have to pay for the sole purpose of getting to school on time. So, what do you do if you’re one of the many poor souls who is too late to receive a parking pass?
In my case, I let my inner criminal mastermind get the best of me. It’s impossible to drive by the senior lot and not notice the abundance of open spaces in the lower area, or go into the junior lot and not see that there are quite a few empty spots. So, as any broke teenager with no common sense would do, I spent a whopping three dollars to make, print, and laminate a fake parking pass.
On my first day using it, I was convinced that it would work flawlessly. I parked my car in the senior lot (which, admittedly, being a junior, was probably a bad move). However, within only my second hour of being in school, my administrator called me out of class and alerted me that I needed to go take my fake permit down and that my car ‘might’ get a ticket. Even though I was sad that my plan didn’t work, I wasn’t too torn up about it, as I had assumed I would get a gentle warning and a parking ticket.
Wrong. I went outside later in the day to grab money from my car, and low and behold, there was two giant sticky notes on my side mirrors displaying the word ‘TOW’. I quickly moved my car to a meter and fed it with the three quarters that I had in my car, but unfortunately, there were still three more class periods left in the day. Honestly, I couldn’t stand the idea of getting another parking ticket.
To spare the details, I left the building my next class in a desperate attempt to find enough change, and once I found a sufficient amount, it was already ninth hour. I’m not going to pretend that faking a parking permit is a noble act or even vaguely smart, however, the fact that they took the school took the time to search my license plate number, connect it back to me, pull me out of class, ticket me, and even try to tow me just for parking in a lot that was at least three quarters vacant seems a little much.
My car now (semi) happily resides in a lot about two blocks away, costing me a moderate thirty dollars a month. Maybe, just maybe, the administration should spend more time ticketing the Creighton students who take up junior lot spaces than Central students who only want to park a little bit closer to school.