My Husband

This past week Mr. Morgan traveled downtown to meet Christopher for lunch, and when he returned to his parked car, he found a parking ticket for an expired meter on his windshield. However, he did not have an expired meter for when the ticket was written.

So home with his parking ticket Mr. Morgan came, and he was fuming: The injustice of having "followed the rules," as he said, yet still being punished was almost more than he could take. If you don't know Mr. Morgan well, then you may not know that he has a deeply rooted sense of justice.

Since he is also methodical, organized, and technical, the next morning he traveled back downtown to fight the $14 ticket. (Yes, he spent more time, money, and energy on fighting the ticket, but he wasn't about to pay it. He said he wouldn't have physically been able to write the check; then he was pretending unsuccessfully to try and tell his hand what to do, which reminded me of this scene in Liar, Liar with Jim Carrey.) I knew he was going to fight the ticket, what I didn't know was the lengthy preparations he had made.

Mr. Morgan went to the parking ticket office with a detailed itinerary, complete with latitude and longitude coordinates of his parking space and the restaurant. He had exact times listed for each activity based on the timestamps from his cell phone calls to and from Christopher. Mr. Morgan also had a hand-written note left by a stranger on his car informing him that he'd been given a parking ticket with time still left on his meter.

With all this evidence in hand, Mr. Morgan fought his ticket at the parking ticket office. He did not have to pay the fine, and the attendant told him they'd received this same complaint from other folks too. If fighting the ticket had proved unsuccessful, Mr. Morgan was going to call his favorite newscaster to report the injustice.