MADDENING: I get a COLLECTION NOTICE from the City of Chicago for two unpaid parking tickets. Parking tickets? My God, I haven't had a parking ticket in ages. And the few times I have had one I've paid it online within hours (or days) of receiving it. Tickets are the kind of loose ends I can't stand to have in my life anymore. Sure, when I was younger I had my irresponsible moments, those times when I let unpaid tickets stack up and my parents had to bail me out, so to speak. But what the heck is this?

Closer scrutiny reveals the tickets in question are from 1997 and 1998. They're for locations I've never parked, and for car makes I've never owned. Sure, that's my license plate number, but I'm guessing somebody just ripped the plates from an old car (I totalled one years ago) and drove around parking with abandon. Seems obvious, right?

So I call the city to straighten things out. After enduring a painfully long hold process, complete with all manner of cheerful "please stay on the line" messages, I finally get through to a helpful operator. "Please hold, sir," she says, after I provide her with my plate number. I hear a strange click, then a pause, then I'm back at very first menu in the city's automated phone system, asking me to press 1 for English, etc. I wait it out again, and after about ten minutes I get another operator, and we start the whole process over.

After a meandering conversation, the bottom line according the operator is that I should have appealed these tickets years ago (despite the fact I have no recollection of ever seeing them before), and since I didn't I'm stuck with the bill. "Sir, you could have been putting your license plate on all kinds of different vehicles. We have no way of knowing." Yeah, but the thing is I didn't do that. And now you've sent me tickets for vehicles I don't own for parking on streets I've never visited, and you've escalated the fines to where they're ridiculously expensive. Way to go, Chicago. So that's how you're paying for all those beautification projects.