Seeking Justice (and Mercy) From the Meter Reader

The note was eloquent in its simplicity. "No god" was all it said.

The person who wrote it had meant to write "No good" -- as in out of order, busted, kaput-- but "No god" was perhaps closer to the point: Would a just and loving god allow broken parking meters?

That is the sort of existential thought that went through my mind as I perused a unique collection assembled by Eric Jenkins. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Eric has the world's foremost collection of notes left by motorists on broken parking meters: those desperate missives hurriedly scribbled to an unseen meter reader in the hope of a little mercy.

"Hey," the notes seem to argue, "I'm not the sort of person who wouldn't pay for parking. I tried -- Lord knows I tried -- but this meter is broken. Give me a break, will you?"

That's the subtext of the notes, but the text is usually a little terser:

"Won't take money."

"BROAKEN."

"It is out of services!"

"Takes Money Does Not Give Time!!"

"You see a lot of exclamation points," Eric, the connoisseur, pointed out as he lifted notes from an overstuffed box. "There's a lot of fear and anxiety."

Eric is an associate professor of architecture at Catholic University, and he has an architect's fascination with the engineering required to produce and affix these notes. It's a creative challenge: Using just the materials found somewhere on your person or in your car, can you persuade a ticket-dispensing bureaucrat to cut you some slack?

Man, the toolmaking animal, resorts to envelopes, napkins, paper bags, Rolodex cards, Post-Its. One note is scrawled on the back of a Superior Court detention list (meters near courthouses are prime collecting territory). Another is on the back of a bib from the Fairfax pediatric practice of Drs. Kacedan and Wolf.