Working on the weekend

So this morning both Husband and I had to go to lab. He had some pretty labor intensive things to do, while I mostly had to just shuffle some stuff around, start a couple of cultures... easy stuff. So I dropped Husband off at his lab and then Bean and I drove on over to my lab.

Now, I work at a University, so of course parking on campus is ridiculously expensive and I don't have a parking permit. And since the University is obnoxious, you can't even park there on weekdays until after 9:00 p.m., and on the weekends you can't park without a permit until after noon. Well, I like to get my lab work early, so I will usually pay for street parking near lab, or if that's not available, park illegally on campus.

Well, when I show up to lab with Bean in tow, there's parking enforcement dutifully ticketing all the suckers... I mean scientists, who are there working on the weekend. I mean, it's pretty obvious that the people who are parking there are people coming to WORK FOR THE UNIVERSITY. Nonetheless, the University sends out parking enforcement to ticket its own employees for coming in to work.

Anyway, so I decide not to park illegally, and instead I find some pay parking a few blocks away from lab and since Bean is now asleep in her car seat, I have to lug 20+ pounds of car-seated baby back to lab. My lab work is non-eventful, and I lug Bean back to the car. I pass the parking guy who is still ticketing other cars.

Once I get back to my car, I put Bean's seat in the back, pull down my parking sticker, and turn on the car. Before I actually pull away from the curb, I look down at my iPod and start scrolling through to find some new music. Just as I settle on the Magnetic Fields, there's a rapping sound at my window. I look up to see the parking guy waving his ticket-writing-thing-a-ma-jig at me.

I pulled the parking sticker back out to show him that I did in fact pay for parking, but he doesn't leave until I actually re-post it in my window so that he can see that I still have 6 minutes left on the sticker. Then he moves on to the car in front of me to ticket them.

The baby is in the back seat, I'm in the front, the car is running, and I am clearly just finding something on my iPod, and yet the guy was going to issue me a ticket!

And that's our reward for working on the weekends. A parking ticket.