Traffic Court Again

Went to traffic court again on Thursday. This is a ticket I got back in March for speeding. I got offered a pretty good deal -- 90 days deferred adjudication, take a defensive driving class, pay the fine, and it's like it never happened. This is a pretty standard deal in Texas, other than the driving class, and usually I'll take it. However, I feel the prosecution doesn't really have a case and I've got a witness, so I made my counter offer: 90 days deferred, no class, reduced fine.

Rejected. 90 days, no class, full fine also rejected.

So, looks like I'll be going to trial. I should get one more shot to negotiate, so we'll see how that goes. I need to file a couple of requests for routine paperwork in preparation, but hopefully, it won't go that far. We'll see.

For those who don't know, deferred adjudication just means that you can't have another ticket post to your record during the time you're on deferment. You can get other tickets, you can even get other deferments, you just can't let any of them go on your record. If you manage to stay out of trouble for 90 days, the ticket disappears like it never happened. This particular court is unusual in that they really like you to waste your time taking a DDC while on deferment. It doesn't count against the one per year agreement the state lets you use to get out of a ticket, but it doesn't change the fact that I hate taking them -- I could practically teach the class at this point, it's absurd for me to attend.

Don't valet park your car.

This is just a little tip I have for you after talking to a valet I know.

Everything you worry about when people valet your car, yeah, that sometimes happens. I've been forbidden to talk in specifics, but I'll do the best I can about a particular valet at a particular spot downtown and some specifics I've heard about.

This valet works at a very prominent location downtown and routinely valets cars that are worth more than most people make in a year. Nearly every single one of these cars he drifts around the garage when he parks them. The valet level of the parking garage is mostly closed off from the public, so no one other than the other valets and management actually sees what they do. What kind of cars are we talking about? Oh, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, stuff like that. I've heard stories about the races they stage down in the garage -- literal drag races between things like a Ford GT and a Porsche GT2. He'll talk about which cars can reach over 70 mph in the garage, and how close they like to slide the cars near the concrete at the entrance to the garage.

Even worse, they see nothing wrong with what they're doing. They claim that they're driving the cars no harder or rougher than the owners would, and the concrete floor of the garage is sealed and slick, so sliding the car is easier and more predictable to do than you'd think. All of this may be true, but it doesn't excuse the behavior. I drive the red Porsche Cayman S you see in the banner at the top, and I'm pretty generous with letting people drive it. I also race that car, and I can tell you that it's very likely that no one would drive the car as hard as I drive it. Even still, if one of my friends drove the car like this guy says he routinely drives the customer cars, the ride would be over real fast. We wouldn't even be having much of a discussion other than "Stop. Now." If I don't even know you?

Look, it doesn't matter one bit what the valet parker thinks. As the owner of a car that he thinks nothing of trashing, I can tell you that it does personally bother me. I didn't give you license to drive it that way, and while I might drive it harder, I also pay the bills and tires and other consumables. A better argument would be, "how about I fuck your girlfriend? I probably won't fuck her as hard as you would."

Oh, and for those of you who haven't yet signed off of valet parking, management is aware of this behavior and approves of it. No one's been fired for it, and no one's been reprimanded for it either.

Portholes confuse me.

And not just in the fact that people find them attractive.

So, this is the new ghetto modification -- fake portholes. Usually, they don't do this good of a job lining them up or even figuring out where they should go, they just do a real slapdash job of "good enough" which looks absolutely terrible. But, that's not what I find most interesting about this trend.

These things were started by Buick, back in the day when the Buick name actually meant something, and the number of portholes (3 or 4) denoted if you had the low-rent engine or the high-horsepower one. Buick reintroduced them in 2003 on the Park Avenue, mainly as a way to tie the Buick name back to its illustrious past. They still do it, but it was mostly a marketing failure -- no one's really buying that Buicks are somehow cool and everywhere other than China, it's a failing brand name.

Yet, somehow, the portholes became ghetto chic. They caught on in a way that Buick never has, and now I see these plastered on every low rent car on the east side of Austin. My only question is why? I mean I could understand it if Mercedes had done it, or Cadillac had done it -- well, maybe not understand, but at least it would make some kind of ghetto sense -- but I can't understand how something from Buick became the epitome of low class style.

So I just drive around looking at portholes and questioning.