I was on my way to work on my normal route cruising right along (and slowing down) to the red light up ahead. As I pulled up to the light, with another car in front of me, a police car threw on his lights and pulled away from the curb to sit directly behind me. I was flabbergasted and assumed it was for the car in front of me. I wasn't speeding. Couldn't have been speeding. I was on my way to work for crying out loud, and I was early, so it's not like I was in a hurry. As we sat there with Officer Crankypants and his technicolor display behind me, the light eventually turned green and both I and the car in front of me pulled over. The cop stopped and the car in front of me left. But the officer didn't follow him. I was seriously perplexed at this point. To make a long story short (since the ticket itself is not the reason for the blog), he made a point to tell me that I was going 40 in a 30 and Fyler (the street we were on) had a limit of 30. He even pointed at the speed limit sign directly in front of us. I will admit that there's no doubt that I was going 40, I'm sure I was. I was just peeved that I actually got pulled over for that crap. In the city. If you live here, you know what a joke traffic stops are. The police have much better things to worry about like crack addicts, gang violence and burglaries than to worry about a 30 year old girl on her way to work.
On my way to work the next morning, I started to pay attention on the street between where I turned onto it and where he pulled me over. Not one single speed limit sign to tell me it was 30. Nada. Son of a batch of cookies. I wish I had known that when he was giving me his Crankypants schpiel the morning before. (Not that I would have really argued with him though. I would have thought about it and then chickened out.) Crap. There's no way I'm going to want to pay the lawyer fees, etc to contest the ticket in court. Dangit, screwed by The Man.
Fast forward to today when I decided to pay my ticket. My two previous tickets were "fixed" by lawyer friends, so I never had to worry about sending in money for the actual ticket. I just paid the lawyers, and they took care of the rest. The officer had kindly highlighted the information I would need to call to find out how much I owed. It wasn't printed on the ticket anywhere. Well, the City of St. Louis is at least in the 21st century and had a website I could access to find out how much it would be. Mother trucker, it was more expensive than I thought. There was an online payment option, which was awesome. I could pay asap and not worry about mailing in a pesky check.
Ahhh..but the City had other ideas. So, the "website" that can be accessed to pay your ticket is not actually a division of the City of St. Louis's government site. Oh no, it was a website called "Official Payments" that says it's a leading provider of online payments to the IRS, states, municipalities, colleges, on and on and on. I was a bit leery of using the site, but I thought I would at least look into it first. I clicked on the state of MO to find the City information, and got this lovely error message: "Missouri has not yet contracted with Official Payments to process State Payments using credit cards." W. T. F. Are you kidding me? This is ridiculous. I tried searching around the website for 20 minutes trying to get around that, but nope, it wouldn't let me proceed. Brilliant execution by the City of St. Louis again.
So, I was back to paying my ticket via check. As I looked closer to the back of my ticket to see who to make the check out to, I saw that there were two payment options: one for City Violations and one for State Violations. The officer had highlighted the State Violations section. Hmmmm. That didn't make any sense, I was in the city limits when I got pulled over. I decided to call the phone number listed under the City violations, hoping that someone on the other end would be able to help me out.
Ten minutes later I was still on hold, and hadn't spoken to one single human. Lots of pre-recorded messages and numbers to push. I was not happy. Two minutes later, another pre-recorded message told me that they were experiencing a high call volume, and that I should try back between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm to talk to a clerk. (Umm....I was calling at 9:35 am.) And then the evil message thanked me, told me to have a nice day and promptly hung up. I'm not going to lie, curse words were flowing quite freely at this point. It's a good thing I went to another part of the office to make this call or my coworkers would have been a bit alarmed.
I went back to the ticket to study the information and thought that maybe I was supposed to send it to the address listed under State Violations. That is the section he highlighted after all. I had made up my mind to send my check there when I noticed some fine print that said "Checks or payment by mail will NOT be accepted at the Traffic Violation Bureau." The address I was about to send my check to was the Traffic Violation Bureau. What the hell did that mean? Why did it give me an address under Payment Information and then turn around tell me not to send any money there?
Good grief, I just wanted to pay my stupid ticket before the city issued a warrant for my arrest. I decided to try the number under the State Violation section and see if maybe they would at least answer and point me in the right direction. One ring later, I thought I saw salvation, a live person actually answered the phone. But, she dashed my hopes in about 4.6 seconds when she told me she couldn't help me. But, she did give me a number that I could call and they could help me. I turned around and tried that number and got some lady's answering machine. No name, just a recording telling me to leave my name and number. Well, I figured it didn't hurt to at least leave a brief message and hope to hell she would call me back.
I thought maybe I had missed something on the website, so I decided to go back and peruse it again in case I found a way to pay. Especially since the recording told me 84 times while I was on hold that I could pay online. I still found no way around that damn state issue. I even tried to get help from my coworkers. My boss was kind enough to say "who gets speeding tickets in the city? I didn't even know they stopped people for speeding." Well, apparently they do Captain Sarcastic. Or maybe I was just the lucky one that caught Officer Crankypants when he was bored out of his mind.
Since no one could help me, I decided to try calling the city again and again until I actually got someone. Fortunately, this time I was lucky and only waited on hold for 7 minutes. When the lady answered her phone, I kindly explained to her that I had received a speeding ticket in the city, but the officer had marked that I should pay the state. I was wanting to verify where I should send my payment. Below is the conversation that followed:
Clerk: "in a car?"
Heather: "Beg your pardon?:
C: "Were you in a car?"
I tried very hard not to snort at her at this point....because I really wanted to say "no, I was running really really fast." Instead, I said "yes, ma'am, I was in a car."
C: "What was the ticket for?"
My patience was starting to wear thin.
H: "Speeding"
C: "And what do you want to know?"
H: "Where I should send my payment. I have two addresses listed on the ticket and I want to make sure I send it to the correct place."
C: "Okay, what is your ticket number?"
I gave it to her.
C: "Heather Jones?"
H: "Yes."
C: "A ticket for speeding?"
H: "Yeeeesssss."
C: "Okay, you send that here to 1520 Market Street."
I should note that this was NOT one of the two addresses listed on my ticket.
H: "And who should I make the check out to?"
C: "the City of St. Louis."
Again, not on my ticket anywhere.
H: "I'm really glad I called because this address wasn't on the ticket anywhere at all."
C: "Well, we just moved to this location."
Oh ok.
H: "Oh, when was that?"
C: "August."
.....and they still don't have it listed on their computer-generated tickets yet? Again, brilliant execution by this fair city.
H: "Okay, well, thank you for your time, I'll send my check in today."
This stuff only happens to me. Anyone else would have had no trouble paying a simple speeding ticket. But, no, I get the officer who is geographically challenged, the non-functioning website and the Mensa candidate working at the city court. Awesome.
