The Lemming Effect

Hi everyone,

Don't you remember when your mother told you this: "If your friend jumped off a building, would you do it too?" She was trying to warn you that following the crowd was sometimes not a wise thing to do. This morning I saw a perfect example of why this is true.

I was doing the 8AM to 10AM street sweeper route. I turned a corner onto a rather busy street in our little burg and to my astonishment the whole block was full of parked cars. Full!

Holy Smoke!, I exclaimed (okay, actually I exclaimed something different but hey, I never know who may be reading this). There were at least seven cars there in the sweeper zone. I got out and started writing tickets furiously. I'm sure if anyone had come out and seen me, they would have been furious too.

Now, the reason there were so many cars there was what I call The Lemming Effect. If one goes over the cliff, they all do. (I have since come to find out that lemmings don't really do this, but for my purposes I'll use it because I like it and it's my blog). When one car parks somewhere, even illegally, people just assume that because that person parked here it must be okay. HA! I'll say it again. HA! No need to actually read the sign, there are cars here. It must be okay. HA! What they didn't know was that one of those vehicles was disabled (it had a note saying it had a dead battery. A word about this: we don't always believe the notes but we are obliged to honor them because, who knows?, it may be true and we wouldn't want to cite a vehicle that actually can't move. Vehicles do stop working now and again. For proof you only have to look at my old car, if you can find it. I've stopped looking).

So, I wrote five tickets in that spot this morning. I didn't cite the disabled car and one guy came out and I let him go because he was just making a quick delivery to the medical center across the street. Wait, there was a medical center across the street? You didn't say that! Well, yes. This is also one reason why there were so many cars on that side of the street. The parking over there is abysmal. And the drivers don't want to pay the five to seven bucks for the parking structure. Instead, they park illegally and have to shell out forty bucks. Oh, Brother.

Lemmings may just have more intelligence than people after all.

Ten-Seven