Ask A Genius 858: LA and Pricing
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/21
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right. So, we were talking about transcribing because there’s a whole process when we’re talking and then to get it turned into a print for putting on online. I have a transcription story that infuriated my wife and myself. Carol got a driving ticket from the highway patrol for making a maneuver that she didn’t actually do; by a motorcycle cop whose view was obstructed and just jumped to a conclusion because somebody behind Carol in a Porsche SUV got impatient. The cop jumped to the conclusion that Carol had made an illegal lane change or dangerous lane change when Carol hadn’t actually gotten out of the lane she was in. Carol gets this ticket and I’m like, “Take it to court” The way you do traffic tickets in LA and probably a lot of other cities is you go to court hoping that the cop doesn’t show up because if the cop doesn’t show up, then you get off. This cop showed up with his wife because if you’re Highway Patrol and you show up in court, you get a total of like five hours off so they could go out to a nice lunch date afterwards.
So, if you live in a big city like LA, there are certain things that are unfair that your kind of supposed to just suck it up because it’s the price of living in a big city. Like, Carol one time got a ticket for not turning her wheels into the curb while parked on a hill except she wasn’t parked on a hill, she was parked in the flat at the top of a hill but it was flat where she was parked, it’s just the turning in your wheel zone started I guess with her car and then proceeded down the hill. So, that was bullshit and it was like a 140 Buck bullshit and this thing with this bullshit traffic ticket that I talked about in the previous segment. What LA does when they resurface; they have the asphalt, they have big machines that shave off like two or three inches of pavement along a street and I guess they take it to the asphalt plant and turn it back into new shit by adding shit and then they lay down a fresh coat but for several days the street has been shaved except for around the manholes because those have to rise up to the level that the street should be at. Then they’re supposed to add a hump of asphalt around the pipe that’s sticking out so that it doesn’t destroy your car. Once I was going down Sepulveda and at the speed you go down Sepulveda, I hit one of these mounds on shaved Sepulveda that hadn’t been adequately mounded or bermed and it took out the oil pan of my car. It just wrecked it and it was 600 bucks for the repair and that was the beginning of the end of that car.
I was told you can write to the city about road hazards and they will compensate you if it was their fault which this was. So, I wrote them a letter and they said “No, we’re not doing it,” then I found out years later that they always turn you down the first time, that it’s on the second letter that they’ll capitulate but I didn’t know that. So, the city just cost me 600 bucks and I was just generally pissed at them. And my local library; the Amelia Earhart Library was cleaning out books. Libraries have to get rid of books that people haven’t looked at in a zillion years which is all books now that everybody’s online but back then they had a dumpster filled with books. Every day they were just throwing out a ton of books and so my scam was these were books that I don’t know where they were going exactly but they were in a dumpster. Maybe they were going to get recycled or in a landfill, I don’t know, but I just showed up and I would fill up my car trunk with a bunch of books. I would take them to the thrift store, turn them in and get a receipt for turning in books and use that to take a charitable deduction which you can do. When you donate goods to a thrift store, you can take a tax deduction for charitable contributions for the value of the goods you donate. So, I was doing this and generating some tax deductions which I felt was fair considering what the city had cost me. It was kind of a victimless crime; books get recycled.
So, anyway I was doing this and somebody must have seen me doing it like time after time over a period of a week and so eventually I was busted by the library police. So, I’m doing it and this guy in some kind of library uniform roars up on a motorcycle and says “Don’t do that” and I’m like okay. So, I quit doing that but he couldn’t do anything about it and all he could do was scare me because I was just taking books out of a dumpster.
So, my revenge on the city of LA was stealing books out of the garbage. The end.
[Recording End]
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