Entitled Bitch Argues About Tickets, Then Uses Tears To Get Her Way

Hello All,

It's been a loooooong time since I last submitted. This story needs a little background info, so I apologize for the length but it's worth it, trust me. I am a Former Parking Bitch, and go by that in the comments. When I last posted I was working as an outdoor parking salesperson for local events like hockey, baseball, football, etc. Last January I started helping out in the branch office to pick up some extra hours, and that led to me being hired full-time as a customer service representative. I'm sure everyone knows how much people just looove having to pay for parking, and when things go wrong I think you can see how easily people could turn into tantrum-throwing entitled brats, regardless of age. I quit last summer after about 6 months in the office in order to finish my degree, but I have one story that even now I will work into conversations with friends and family.

A nicely dressed young woman, probably in the 25-35 year old range (I suck at guessing ages), came into the office because her car had been towed, even though she was a monthly parker. My coworker pulled up the woman's license plate in our violations system, and lo and behold the woman has ELEVEN tickets on her license plate, 4 of which had been cancelled already upon proof that she was a valid monthly parker. Now our policy is that technically we can tow a vehicle on 1 ticket, but we usually wait until someone has accumulated 3 or 4. We will also usually only void 1 or 2 tickets out of courtesy, but again once it becomes clear that they have been warned, we don't make any more concessions. All 11 of this woman's tickets were for the same thing: Failure to display a valid pass when in a monthly parking spot. If your pass isn't showing, the patrollers have no way of knowing if you're paying for that spot.

My coworker explains all of this, and the woman starts freaking out. Her excuse is that her car has a rearview mirror with an abnormally wide base, and the plastic pass wouldn't fit on it, so her solution was to try and put it in various locations. On the sunken area of the console, on the driver's seat, IN THE BACK WINDOW, basically anywhere that the patroller wouldn't think to look.

I butt in at this point and say (admittedly in a "are you stupid?" tone of voice) "Umm.... why didn't you just use a piece of string or an elastic to attach the pass to the mirror?"

She says, "I didn't think of that..."

REALLY? you thought putting in the back window made sense but you didn't think to get a piece of string?

After that, the woman starts to become more and more angry that we're refusing to cancel the tickets and refund the cost of releasing her vehicle from the towing company.

Then she drops this gem: "I make $300 an hour, technically you owe me money for the hours that I've spent on the phone trying to get these tickets cancelled and for the time I've spent here trying to get my car back!"

All sympathy I may have had instantly disappears. I do not give two shits how much you make, don't you dare use that as an excuse for why you think you should be treated extra special, especially when it's 25 times what I make. On a purely mathematical basis, it would have been cheaper for her to just pay the tickets rather than wasting her precious time trying to cancel them, so that was her own stupidity and not our problem.

Eventually, after a good 10-20 minutes of arguing and her refusing our offers of letting her pay $20 for each ticket instead of $32, we get the manager for her parking lot up to the front to try and defuse the situation. Once the person of authority shows up, she drops the entitled attitude and switches to "oh poor me" and starts CRYING.

Now I am in the negative sympathy zone, and I'm thinking "You are a grown-ass, educated woman in a highly professional environment on a daily basis and you were just rubbing your salary in our faces and screaming at us."

She was clearly using the tears to manipulate the male manager, and sadly it worked. In the end I think all of her tickets were cancelled, and the manager was practically crawling on his knees trying to appease this woman. She stopped crying the instant she started to get what she wanted. It made me feel sick, so I walked away from my desk for a few minutes to try and get my own anger under control, and once she left and the office was clear of customers I burst into a bitch-fest with my coworker.

So that's the story of how special snowflakes can get whatever they want simply by crying. I think my next submission will be the story of the entitled mothers, so stay tuned for more!

--(Former) Parking Bitch

Comments

[Karebear]

Where does she work and what does she do that makes her get $300 per hour? I want in on that.

[(Former) Parking Bitch]

She was probably a lawyer or some sort of corporate consultant.

[Jane]

Wouldn't it have been simpler to proactively contact her and explain why she kept getting ticketed - and suggest that string workaround - than to make no effort whatsoever and just hope she figures it out on her own? Or until the pot boils over like it did in this incident?

Clearly, she wasn't following the rules, but she's a paying customer, not some scofflaw; work WITH her.

[(Former) Parking Bitch]

How are we supposed to contact someone with simply her license plate? The way our ticketing system worked, we had a license plate, a vehicle make, time, location and reason for a ticket, and that was it. We are not associated with the government, so we couldn't access people's private information through the vehicle licensing department and would therefore have no way of contacting them.

Her pass wasn't visible, so we had no way of knowing if she was a monthly parker or just some random person and couldn't get contact info through that system either. It is a driver's responsibility to keep track of their tickets, and only once something goes into collections would there be even a remote possibility of them being contacted.

Every other time she had called, she was speaking with someone in the contact centre in Vancouver, and unfortunately they were not too bright over there. I don't think it would have ever occurred to them to suggest something like using a string.

[Jane]

That's a good point - I just assumed that parkers register their vehicle with you when signing up for the pass in the first place. At least that's what it's been like for me.

[AmigaTech]

Howzabout a pair of scissors, and make the pass fit?

--AT

Still, eleven tickets, she should start to realize something's wrong with her ways.

Secondly, well, paying customer. It might be easy enough to tell the patrollers, "Also, check dashboard" and give that as an optional place to put the pass. Of course, that would mean they have to get out of their little cart and actually walk a little.

[Humor_Me]

Because common sense (finding a way to put it on her rearview) isn't so common anymore, and crying your way out of it is naturally the easiest.

[CoG]

Sometimes I think they should do spinal tests on managers... to see if they have one >.<

[Skittles]

Seriously folks should the parking lot company employees start following her home and whiping her ass for her as well. Is it really so much to ask that she as a grown adult try to actually solve her own issue, or I don't know maybe ask them for help when she first realized the pass wouldn't fit her rearview mirror in the first place? If she had asked for help before getting all of those tickets or at any one of the first 4 or 5 times came in and explained the issue it could have been taken care of long before this point.

[NC Tony]

I honestly think if I were in your position, as soon as she started crying I would start laughing and say pretty much what you were thinking ("You are a grown-ass, educated woman in a highly professional environment on a daily basis and you were just rubbing your salary in our faces and screaming at us."). Then I would have offered to buy the manager a spine, because he clearly lacks one.

I feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with this "woman" on a regular basis, but when I meet truly horrible people like this, I just content myself with the fact that nobody lives forever, and eventually this horrible excuse for a human being will die.

[Techtyger]

My experience here, which may be different from (F)PB's setup, but the people who do the towing are not the people who run the parking lot. It's a towing/impound company that has a contract with the lot. Around here, you see signs on parking lots that tell you the parking rules and the company to contact if your car was towed.

[The Worst]

I have the same problem as this woman - my parking pass won't fit on my rear view mirror. In a moment of frustrated desperation I duct taped the darn thing. Honestly though, I would be really angry if my car got towed when I was paying for a spot if my pass was displayed, just not in the exact place it was supposed to go. That seems like laziness and negligence on the part of the parking attendants (on the dash that is... the back window is another matter). Granted, my parking lot doesn't give tickets, they just tow you, so if she had eleven warnings that is definitely her bad, and she should've talked to the office about her issue sooner.