Back in January I got a ticket for driving in the bus lane on market -- fine, I didn't see the sign in the rain, I'm willing to pay the ticket. But the citation never showed up on their call-in system, and they never sent me a letter or anything. The instructions on the citation itself are to call that same system or to show up at 850 Bryant, but who's going to go there when the system says the citation doesn't exist? So after calling to check on it a few times, I assumed it had gotten lost.

Then last week, I call my insurance agent and find out my license was suspended in June -- still with no notification. I visited the DMV, which confirmed they have my correct address (and that they send out notification of such things), but they could only tell me that it was a San Francisco citation and charge me $55 so that my license would be un-suspended as soon as the SF court says it's okay.

I spent about an hour navigating at same SF court call-in system on Friday to try to get some information -- like how to pay this off -- but it continued insisting that my citation doesn't exist, and the option to talk to an operator resulted in either a busy signal or a phone that rang forever. This morning (Monday) I did finally get to a person, and they gave me numbers directly to the desks of tax collectors.

The second of these numbers got to a person who sounded very nice and understanding, and told me I owe $458.96. I'm lucky, I can afford it, but I certainly wasn't planning on another big expense in the middle of moving. I remember when that was an entire paycheck. It wasn't all that long ago.

And imagine if I'd had to, say, WORK during business hours instead of sitting on hold -- there'd be absolutely no hope of ever clearing this up.

I can sympathize with the city's need to reduce the number of cars downtown, and to keep parking turning over, so I pay those fines when I have to. It's part of the cost of visiting a wonderful town. But this? This is just bureaucrats (except for the one nice lady in the tax office) not giving a fuck, and it's one more example of the city government going out of their way to make it hard to interact with them.

I suppose they don't have to care. Everyone wants to live in San Francisco, no matter how broken it is, right?