Ticketed…

I don’t recall if I wrote about this here or not, but about a month or so ago, I received an automated ticket in the mail. It was for going through a red light and the camera snapped the picture. These cameras were recently installed near my employers offices and a huge percentage of my coworkers have received the same exact ticket. It’s not for blowing through a red light into an intersection or anything. This is a red light ticket for turning right on a red light, after looking to make sure cars weren’t coming and proceeding legally and safely. Ugh. We’ve all tried to fight the ticket and have all gotten back the usual “thanks but no thanks” letter back. The ticket costs about $350 and I’m sure it’s being put to great use paying for this overpriced piece of shit camera they put in that doesn’t even work correctly. Point in case, when it rains and no one is in the intersection, the strobe lights are just going off every second. I think the rain confuses it. Who knows.

Anyhow, I paid the ticket, because the money wasn’t really the issue, and have the option of doing traffic school to get the points taken off my record. Traffic school can either be done in a physical classroom for eight hours or online at your own pace. Hmm. Lemme think. They have all sorts of traffic schools, from comedy to pizza to HD television. Anything to get a warm body in there, I guess. I did it online in about three hours. A video traffic school, where they basically show you clips of cars driving on freeways and streets the entire time, with this drunk guy reading this script that you can basically just print out. So I skipped through most of the videos, printed the scripts and then took the tests. I pretty much passed each one with flying colors, probably missing a total of 2 or 3, from four 30 question tests. Ugh. I think I missed those because I was BORED and not paying attention.

Anyhow, I get my certificate mailed to me in a couple of days, mail it off to the court and I’ll be done with it all. My driving record is pretty clean. The last time I got a ticket I attended a traffic school over the course of two days—four hours each day. I think I attended with a coworker that had also gotten a ticket, so it made it a little bit easier. That was something like ten years ago.

Regardless, it’s over and done with. And when I approach that intersection now, I just sit there on the red light instead of turning on the red, like I’m legally allowed to do after making a stop. It pissed off everyone behind me, but them are the breaks.