Parking against the traffic flow

I was just leafing through some of my old receipts when I came across a parking fine from about a week ago. The offence? “Parking against traffic flow”.

I was with Lix that day, and we had just finished our business with our bridal photography studio, picking out the photos that were to go into our pre-wedding photo album (recall that I wrote we went to Taiwan for our pre-wedding photo shoot?).

Feeling not particularly hungry, but wanting to “get lunch out of the way” (we are very practical people), we decided to lunch around that area, though I remember telling her that parking was hard to find and that we’d only lunch in that area if we managed to find one.

Lo and behold, (to my utter regret later on,) we found one.

(Before I fast-forward to the main point of this true story, let me add that lunch was terrible. I had some kway teow soup that tasted like the processed “instant” variety, without the seasoning.)

So, as I was saying, we found a parking space, and with the recklessness excitement of a two-year-old ADHD child I swerved right in. As I was adjusting my car, the car behind me was getting out (the significance of this event would only appear to me later on). Illustrations follow:

So bla bla bla, went for lunch and returned to find a parking ticket. F***.

Expecting it to be a fine for, say, stating the time for 20 minutes after I’d actually parked or for exceeding my time limit, I wasn’t too worried at first.

So when Lix told me how much it cost, fifty–might-as-well-be-a-gazillion–bucks, my heart dropped. And when I asked what it was for, and she told me parking against the traffic flow, the heart of my heart dropped and rolled on the floor dying of wtfness. (I didn’t even know it was a two-way street.)

Well friends, you’ve been warned.

Epilogue

(The significance of the woman behind me was that she, too, was parking against the traffic flow. Only thing was she didn’t meet the traffic-warden of death.)

In case you’re wondering, this happened at Ann Siang Road, near Maxwell Market (the Chinatown/Outram area).

This incident reminded me of an incident (incidents really) that Zixuan had told me about, that this “parking against the traffic flow” was a regular thing happening at his office carpark, and where tickets for “parking against the traffic flow” were just as regular. He, too, understands the wtfness of it all.