Even though my placard is genuine I rarely use it. I CAN walk, I'm not in a chair. But walking hurts, so I try to ballance the Karma. The only time I take a handicapped space is when 1) it's not the only handicapped space and 2) there isn't a normal space to be found. The last time I used it for a handicapped space was at Mainplace Mall last Christmas. I cruised their parking lot for 20 minutes trying for a normal space, I finally took a blue spot in a group of 5 empty ones.
I will also use it at a meter without feeling guilty. It takes me longer to walk back and forth. I'll feed the meter when I leave, but that way I don't get a ticket if I'm not back in time. That's what I was doing at UCLA that day, their meters had a 30 minute limit and it took me that long to walk to the library.
There's an old movie with Goldie Hawn - Butterflies are Free. She falls in love with a blind artist. At one point she asks if he ever went to college. He says "I was going to go to UCLA, but I couldn't get a parking permit."
Bombast, it sounds like the people in Denver are doing it better than UCLA. They are in a uniform of some kind, they are writing tickets to people who are actually using the placards wrong (altering them, taking 2 spaces). The guy that came after me was sending up every phony cop signal there was, and being belligerent at the same time.
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