Semi apology for the lack of posts. Just a semi one though, cause it’s been so busy and I have been so exhausted. I didn’t commit to a posting schedule – so there.
Now for those of you who may not know, maybe I should take a quick second to explain the Northern sun. Maybe not just the sun, but the weather as well. It gets cold up here. Really cold. -47°C without wind chill in the winter type of cold. Thankfully for this ‘Southern’ boy, it’s coming into spring and I don’t have to deal with that extreme cold… yet.
The coldest I have experience here so far is -2°C. And this is where it gets weird. -2°C here feels like +4 or +5°C down south. I’m not a environmentalist or scientist or meteorologist or whatever ‘ist’ you need to be to figure this stuff out, but I think it has to do with the wet climate of the South versus the dry climate of the North. The cold down south penetrates to your core. It feels like your bones freeze and you’re cold from the inside out. You can layer and layer and layer, but the cold still sneaks through and finds your most inner being of life and freezes it.
In the North it’s different. Thankfully I was somewhat aware of this and for my first walk to work I wore a windbreaker with a hoodie type jacket under that. I stepped out into the open air and the cold hit my face. Could no feel it? Yes. Was it cold? Yes-ish. Its hard to explain. Its a surface cold. Your skin gets cold. As soon as your skin is covered, it’s fine. It would take minutes to warm up exposed parts of your body down south. It’s hard to explain. Don’t get me wrong, -47°C is cold. More cold than I want to experience. But, it’s not -47°C Southern cold.
Putting the cold aside, it is so sunny. Always sunny. I have to wear my sun glasses at 7 a.m. There are no mountains close enough to block the sun. There are hardly any clouds in the sky. No rain. No smog. Just sun. Sunny Mr. Sun.
Anyways. So I get to work Wednesday morning. My boss is there already and we chat for a quick minute until the other rookie officer shows up. We do a bit of review of guidelines and procedures and the boss asks if we want to go out on some calls. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Yes. Yes I do. So we grab our note books, pens, ID’s, phones, everything. We hop into the biggest Bylaw truck we have (the only one that will fit all three of us) and we go.
We drive down streets that I have never seen, avenues that are unknown to me, past houses with occupants that I have never met. First call/file: General Parking. We arrive on scene and there is a car parked on the sidewalk. Ticketable offense. We get out and our boss starts going through the process. We take photos, gather evidence, take notes, check to see if the car is reported stolen – it wasn’t. The car has clearly been sitting there for days, weeks, probably more like months. Its covered in dust and dirt and grime. No windshield wiper marks on the windshield. We decide to leave a notice for removal on the windshield and give a 48 hour compliance time frame. And there it was. Our first call.
As we drive away and turn down the street – BOOM. Second file: General Parking. Another car parked on the sidewalk. We pullover and the boss asks, “What do you guys want to do?” I pipe up instantly, “Let’s give this guy a ticket!” The boss laughs and says “Ok”. Its a Ticketable offense, we can do that. Almost as fast as I fired the first time I said, “Ok, maybe not. Lets go knock on the house (the one it’s parked in front of). If someone answers, let’s explain the bylaw and ask them to move the vehicle. If they are nice and move then great. It’s a warning. If no one is home, or if they turn belligerent, let’s give them the ticket.” Again, my boss says “Ok”. Enforcement through compliance. We can do that.
We knock on the door and an older lady answers. She explains that she is from out of town visiting her daughter and that as the house was close to the corner of the street she didn’t want someone to “zoom around the corner” and hit her car. Fair enough but the bylaw states that you cannot park any vehicle on the side walk. And you could have just moved up and parked on the road. No big deal. She moved the car. She complied. Case closed. Cleaning up the streets. One bylaw infraction at a time.
As the day went on, this seemed to become a theme. Parking on the side walk. Parking on the boulevard. Parking the wrong direction on the street. Parking the wrong direction on the sidewalk. Parking the wrong direction on the boulevard. Must be a Northern thing. We don’t do that down South. Right?
As the day went on we probably attended half a dozen parking calls and half a dozen dog complaint calls. Mostly barking. One “bite” call. Once we did a little investigative work, it seemed more like a dog charged another dog and the owner got scared which they didn’t like so they called us. Besides the fact that the dog was off leash, there wasn’t much else for us to do. No proof of a bite. On we went.
Eventually we got back to the office, did our paper work and signed off for the day. That was our first exposure to bylaw enforcement in the city. It was fun and I was happy. Though, no tickets we’re given out.
I think a good moral for this post is, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”
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