I just got off the phone with the Philadelphia Parking Authority people. I received a notice that I hadn’t paid a ticket I got for an expired inspection except I never got that ticket.
We’ll ignore the fact that my inspection is indeed expired at this moment (it expired after the ticket was issued though and my car is sleeping over at the mechanic’s tonight to get a sticker). We’ll also ignore the fact that I often make a habit of going a month or two before re-inspecting my car because I either flake or get lazy. We can even ignore the fact that in the past I have indeed received the exact same citation. I just don’t go into Philly anymore and I have barely driven my car since the knock sensor issue was identified in July.
I checked the date on the ticket against my calendars and blog, and at the time the ticket was issued I was posting the notice about the Fop getting an LJ account… so… really totally not me. (Hey, I wouldn’t put it past me to completely forget a trip into the city on an errand or something.)
Now, for those of you who have never experienced the joys of Philadelphia, the Parking Authority has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to deal with and impossible to resolve issues with unless you go down there in person… and even in person, it is hard to resolve issues to your satisfaction. A good tactic is to bring a bottle of pain killers, preferably prescription-strength. Is a $61 ticket wondering worth my time to try to fix it or should I just pay it?
I decided to try calling the “pay by phone” number to see if I could get to a real person. The auto-answer menu was either deliberately designed to confuse the caller or just poorly setup. The 2nd level of the menu sounded something like this:
Press 1 … to pay a ticket by phone … press 2 … to get the status of a ticket … to [do something else] press 3 … press 4 … to dispute a ticket … press 5.
Guess what I pressed? 5. And it worked.
After a few moments, I was talking to a real person. A nice person who was able to look up the ticket number and listened to my confusion about getting a ticket when I was neither in the city nor out of inspection. Then she was able pull up a scan of the original ticket to determine that the license plate number was a typo. Well, duh, of course it was a typo but it’s always nice when people agree with me on that kind of thing. She updated the ticket, gave me a confirmation number, and the whole call took less than 10 minutes. I am amazed. I honestly expected to have to provide proof, in person, during business hours (which would have taken me 2-3+ hours round trip and displaced my workday). Hurray for being able to fix typos over the phone!
In other car news, the little Green Hornet is getting all its bits fixed at the new mechanic today and tomorrow. See, the Hornet started to roar a couple weeks ago… now I know that can mean the catalytic converter is dead. The new mechanic gave me reasonable estimates for both exhaust work and the knock sensor, less than 2 car payments if I were to buy a new car right now. Then I looked at the blue book value of the car again. At this point I might as well drive it at least another winter. I’m an expert procrastinator. Besides, Subaru doesn’t have any greens in its color options for 2008.
You know why replacing a catalytic converter is so expensive? At least in part because platinum is used as a catalyst to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. This is what I learned from NPR and the Nobel Prize committee today.
tags: car, catalytic converter, parking, parking tickets, philadelphia parking authority, state inspection
