I meant to write about this in my BLAH BLAH BLAH post. Today is trash pickup day again, so I have to be off my side of the street from 8am-3pm. As I said, I had to go to work early today anyway, so I was long gone by 8am. But over the weekend I went online to pay my parking ticket from last Wednesday. I go to the same city website that I pay my monthly utility bill, but it took a few days for my parking ticket to show up in the system when I entered the number. But get this, they charged me an extra $3 on my $40 ticket. Why? It says it’s a “convenience fee”.

Talk about a scam. Yeah, paying online is much more convenient for me, but you know what? It’s also more convenient for THEM! Do they really want me to write a check and mail it in so they have to then sort it out and take it to the bank and cash it? Or go down to city hall in person to pay it, which is more work for whomever has to handle it? No. I know they’d prefer I just pay online. So why am I getting charged? And it just adds to the annoyance of how this ticket is broken-down in price anyway. As I said before. the actual price of the ticket was $27.50, then they added a “mandated state surcharge” of $12.50, and now a convenience fee of $3.

So that’s $43 I had to pay, just because I left my car parked in front of my own dang house for a few extra minutes one morning. Sheesh. Hence, this title. I feel like I’ve just been mugged by the city government.

I know that I shouldn’t make that big a deal of it, it’s just $43 which isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s just that last week I also got a bill from Blue Cross showing that I owe almost $700 for a bunch of tests my Ophthalmologist did to check my eyes, for my ocular hypertension (the tests came out fine) and then last month I had to spend almost another $700 on my car brakes. So it’s like, dang, I’m trying to save money and be responsible and all that, but every time I turn around something comes up, forcing me to spend money that I wasn’t planning on.

Oh well, I know I shouldn’t complain, I’m still better off than a lot of folks. A roof over my head and a steady job. Two of my coworkers got fired this week. So count my blessings, I guess.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin