Parking Nazis and Technical Superiority

I had a pretty incredible night spanning the wee hours between Wednesday and Thursday. I am in two classes currently that assigned two major papers due on the same day. Breaking my usual custom I started a couple days early. Usually I wait till the last minute. I used to despise myself for laziness, but in observation of myself I’ve noticed a great excitement that comes over me when the ten o’clock hour strikes the night before. I really think I have an infatuation with useless challenges. For instance, I usually find willful, mean, sassy, high strung women most attractive, that never works out in my favor. I like to wait till the last minute to write papers, I really like it. This was different though. I had two papers due the same day, so I did start early.

One paper was a formal report, the other a “What Would You Do” style paper concerning a mock town’s youth problems. The formal report was on Ecotourism and was seventy five percent done when I arrived at Evan’s Library to finish it and start the other one. Moreover, I arrived at the library at 6:30 pm which is far sooner than I usually start. I was feeling pretty confident that I was going to be in bed by two AM at the latest.

I parked off campus and walked to the library. It was a great night, I enjoyed the walk. I arrived at the library and got to work. Now, just to be honest, there was and Astros’ game afoot so I was keeping a close eye on the game via live-cast, for the most part though I was pretty focused. I finished the writing portion of the formal report an hour. I must break from the story here and mention that within this formal report I do believe I wrote the finest sentence that I have ever written thus far. Moving on though, I took a small break and quickly began formatting the report so Copy Corner could quickly and painlessly sculpt my report into a beautifully bound and formatted Formal Report, table of contents and everything.

I spent the next four hours formatting that report. I did the margins, spacing, fonts, pictures, live-cast Astros, punctuation, and a great many long, deep, frustrated breaths. I stopped at around midnight to go home and get some coffee. I realized I might be staying up later than originally scheduled, and to toast to sweet victory, the Astros won. I headed back to campus around midnight thirty.

This time I was going to the Student Computer Center (SCC). It was after midnight so I snagged the closest reserved spot I could get. By my calculations I was going to be gone by five AM, which is long before the Texas A&M parking Nazis fire up their scooters. I stealthily snuck my coffee onto the second floor on the SCC and parked it right next to the most populated table of beautiful young maidens I could scope out. I got back to work right about twelve forty-five.

I formatted for another forty five minutes, breaking only for manly sips of coffee and quality eye contact with beautiful women. Before one forty-five I was done. BOO YAH formal report!

I didn’t even stop for a pat on the back, I dove right in on the problems facing the youth of Teensville. In three and a half hours I had saved Teensville’s youth and established eight phenom youth programs that would quickly be converting Teensville’s at risk youth into our future leaders. All I had to do now was print my papers and head over to the great folks at Copy Corner.

I plugged in to one of the SCC’s computers to print my reports off. Eager to impress the late night printing crew with my formatting prowess I quickly opened my formal report. Bewilderment, shock, anger, profanity. The progression was instantaneous. My heart rate would have quickened if not for vast amounts of caffeine facing through my body. Apparently the version of Word_TM that the SCC supports is not as new as the one on my incredible lap top. All my glorious formatting was now displayed misconstrued and perverted for all the SCC to see. At this point in my life I’m growing accustomed to dealing with always being ahead of the curve. My state of the art version of word was apparently only available to myself and the military. So trying not to pout brood over the SCC’s lack of software tact, I feverishly set to work correcting the formatting achievements which Texas A&M’s lack of technical proficiency had so utterly thwarted.

Well, while I was working away the parking Nazis were cracking down the pagan parking thieves of our holy university. At the time I wasn’t aware that I had so foolishly transgressed upon those sacred grounds.

My mother was the frantic messenger of obvious foopaw. The parking Nazis were closing in on my car. Her frantic nature did not inspire me to immediate action, it merely brought to my attention how tired I was becoming and how close that ten thirty-five turn in time for my formal report was becoming. Being told that my car was already towed I told her I would take the bus to where they were towing my car and deal with it when I was done with my report. She was not satisfied though with my thought and insisted I walk to where she would be waiting to pick me up. So, I walk close a mile across campus to slowly climb into my mother’s silver VW Bug, where I was greeted with, “OK, let’s go see if they have towed your car yet”.

If I had been up for less than thirty-two hours I might have been frustrated or even angry. The SCC was only about two one hundred and fifty yards from my sinful parking spot. It would have taken me all of a moment to jog over to the RESERVED LOT and see if my car was there. Instead I walked all the way across campus to get in my mother’s car so she could drive me back to where I had come from. We pull in to the holy lot and see the back end of my car viciously jacked up unto the back of an A1 towing truck with a parking Nazi joyfully observing. I walk up the parking Nazi and say, “Hey that’s mine, I like it back.” So they start releasing my car. The parking Nazi takes one of the two tickets off my windshield. I instantly felt bad for all the things I had said about them in the past. I started to thing, “maybe they are human”. Then she handed a freshly printed ticket for “releasing” my own car back to me. Eighty-five dollars to give me back my car. EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS!!!!

So I climb in my car and head over to Copy Corner. The formatting had mostly been corrected so I thought it would take maybe twenty minutes to touch it up and print it off. I’d be done around eight-thirty, and have time to take a shower and eat.

I arrive at Copy Corner and like always they are happy to see me. Copy Corner employees, I think, are the happiest people in the world, especially in the morning, one of the great true mysteries left in our world. I give them the jump drive with my formal report on it and they bring it up on their computer. Then, once again, the tides of misfortune came rolling back to shore. The version of word that Copy Corner uses is yet another version of the cursed program that is once again incompatible with the formatting I have completed. I spend another two and a half hour formatting my formal report. The Copy Corner folks were true champions of their trade though and did a great job. By the time I got to Blinn College campus to turn in my formal report the class was almost over. So I crashed in the hallway in front of my Tech Writing Prof’s door. He seemed to be pretty good natured about the whole thing and slightly entertained by the short rendition of my adventure; then again I was pretty loopy. Anyway the moral of this story is: Parking Nazis are not really people but mean robots built out of computer parts that failed inspection. Finally, I must never start on a paper prior to the night before it is due, it just doesn’t work for me.