The Day I Snapped

L.A. Parking Meters Made Me Do It

written by

jaron summers © 2025

It started innocently enough, like all madness does.

I simply wanted to park. Just to park. Not to gamble. Not to solve a riddle from the Book of the Dead. Just to leave my Accord 2008 stationary in a legal space, briefly, while I conducted the business of being alive in Los Angeles.

But in L.A., parking meters aren’t tools. They’re traps — little sun-powered slot machines with solar panels and all the charm of a DMV chatbot powered by resentment and Red Bull.

The Rules of the Game (Spoiler: There Are No Rules)

These meters are not broken. They are masterfully designed to baffle, overcharge, and confuse. Imagine trying to read an Etch-A-Sketch in a tanning bed. That’s your average meter in the wild.

The screen flickers: “INSERT CARD.” You comply. Suddenly you’ve paid $6.75 to park for 14 minutes next to a dumpster and a traffic cone wearing a hat. You try to back out. Too late.

Was the meter working? Who knows. It might have been a toaster.

Reporting the Crime (of Hope)

“Call 3-1-1,” the city says. And so you do — only to enjoy 47 minutes of Kenny G’s second cousin noodling through your Bluetooth speaker before you’re disconnected by a robot who thanks you for your patience and hangs up like a cheating lover.

Online complaint? Crashed. App? Loops you back to the meter. You’re trapped in a civic escape room with no exit — just more fees.

The Day I Snapped (or Slipped)

I did what any reasonable man would do: I snapped. But not internally. No, I expressed myself the American way — with a chainsaw.

I approached the meter with righteous fury, primed for symbolic justice. I’d shave a little off the top. Nothing fatal — just a haircut.

But fate, and printer ink, had other plans. I slipped. The chainsaw did not.

I left the scene significantly lighter in the leg department.

Bureaucracy Comes Bearing Gifts

The paramedics were delightful. The city? Less so.

I was fined $450 for “unauthorized landscape alteration” and cited under some ordinance that I believe was invented mid-ambulance ride.

But here’s the twist.

As I lay in recovery — bruised, stitched, and half a pant size down — the impossible happened: I won.

The City of Los Angeles, in a rare and ironic act of bureaucratic generosity, was compelled to hand me the ultimate prize:

A blue and white Disabled Person Parking Placard.

Yes. The very institution that billed me into madness and maimed me into modern art, finally bent the knee. No more meters. No more blinking prompts. No more MAXIMUM CHARGE. Just victory, laminated and dangling from my rearview mirror like a badge of tragic honor.

I had fought the meter. The meter had won… but so did I.

The Moral of the Story?

Because only then — only then — will the machinery of the city look upon you with mercy, stamp something official, and give you what you always wanted:

A parking spot. Free. Legal. And blessed by bureaucracy.

Would I do it again?

Well, my remaining leg twitches every time I see one of those sun-powered devils, so probably not. But now I get to twitch from the comfort of a reserved spot, next to City Hall, where the real machinery hums quietly and no one reads your appeal.

In Summary

L.A. parking meters aren’t broken. They are simply brilliant machines doing exactly what they were built to do:

Confuse legally, charge automatically,  and grin electronically.

And if you’re reading this while parked downtown… good luck. Your meter is watching. And it’s hungry.