Metro Nashville Government Woes

Wow, I’m not entirely sure where to start. I think government in general is a good idea, but Metro Nashville must have drawn the short straw when it came to good governance.

Several weeks ago, I received a citation for going 51 mph in a 35 mph zone. Fine, I admit that I was speeding. But, to allay any fear that I am a crazed road demon bent on life-threatening speed orgasms, let me explain:

The road I was tagged on is actually a bridge. The Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge is “Nashville’s new front door… reconnecting neighborhoods in East Nashville and the Downtown area.” Yay, great for it, right? Well keep in mind this bridge is big, really big (for Nashville). Six lanes adorn this bad boy. Six lanes, both going downhill, thanks to the bridge’s arched design. Even though the standard flow of traffic runs around 50 mph, the posted speed limit here is only 35 mph — can anyone say speed trap? And a speed trap it is. A few days ago, I counted six cops sitting around this road, all within a few hundred yards of each-other. That’s a cop for every lane.

So… I get pegged for following the flow of traffic. Ok, the officer wrote me a ticket, I was speeding, just shut up and pay your dues right? Well, being my first offense, I am eligible for traffic school. I went online to read about the registration process. I had a few questions, so I called the traffic school. When the attendant looked at my file, she informed me that I could not take the online traffic school course, and that I would either have to take off work early, or come in on a Saturday, for a 4.5 hour long course. Well, both options were rather unsavory, as I live almost an hour away, so I asked the attendant why I couldn’t take the online course. The answer I was given just about knocked my socks off. “You’re only 24, and if you are under 26 or over 55, you can’t take the online course,” she explained to me. Hmm, this sounds a lot like age discrimination, so I decided to put a call in to the Metro Human Relations Commission.

I explained my situation to an attendant at the commission, pointing out that I am in-fact being subjected to a harsher punishment based on my age. Laugh all you want, but I either spend extra money driving in on a weekend for the course, or I have to work with my employer for time off, and am forced to stay in Nashville until late one night. The attendant actually told me that they could make a case out of this, meaning there is some apparent discrimination, but because I am under 40, I am not protected by age discrimination law. This is thanks to our wonderful federal government who has decided that reverse age discrimination doesn’t matter. Ok, so what if I was a minority race, would that matter? You betcha it would. So what’s the difference? Who knows.

Fast forward a few days, I knew that I had to get things squared away, so I went online to pay for traffic school and to pay my clerk’s cost. Metro is really pushing this 24-hour online payment setup as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The system, called PaymentChek, appears to have been developed by a company out of Brentwood. As a professional courtesy, I’m not going to mock this company. I’m sure their system works fine. However, after entering all of my information, and trying to pay my fee, the system immediately returned an undefined error, saying it could not process my payment. I tried entering all of my information in again, just in case I had entered it in wrong the first time, but to no avail. So now, thanks to Metro, I have to pay my fine by the 25th, which happens to be on a Sunday, and the only method through which I can pay it has decided to not accept my payment. Hmm, seems to me like Metro needs to have 24-hour support for their 24-hour payment setup.

I’m not entirely sure what the final outcome of the whole mess will be, but it has taught me a valuable lesson: Metro Nashville will screw you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, except to bend over and spread em’.