The City of San Jose

The Man has been keeping me down lately. Time for a laundry list of complaints about the city I live and work in.

Licensure -- Last year I got a letter from The City telling me that I owed them money, and lots of it. They said that I had a business in San Jose, but that I had not been paying my Business License Fee. Not only did I owe money for the License, but I owed it for the past couple of years plus penalties for not paying it. This was because of money I make for writing for IBM. Of course I had to also pay this License fee again this year...

Crime -- As I mentioned a few months ago, my wife's mini-van got broken into and the DVD player was stolen. I filed a report with The City. The City's response? That would be no response. That is what I should expect, right?

Police Harassment -- Last month, we were parked in downtown San Jose, taking the kids to get ice cream at Ben & Jerry's. The spot was a metered spot. We went past the time limit by 10 minutes and of course we got a parking ticket for $28.

Trespassing -- This is the worst. On Monday, I was walking to my car about to go to work. I notice a piece of paper on my wife's mini-van. I look, and it is a ticket. The $35 ticket was for blocking the sidewalk. Our van was parked in our driveway, but the rear of the van did indeed protrude on to said sidewalk. It did not prevent it from being used, and there was more driveway past the sidewalk, so there was plenty of room to walk by my house without having to use the street or walk in our yard/driveway. Whatever. It was very aggravating to me that I could have our car parked at our house and a policeman could come on to my property to give me a ticket.

All in all I feel that The City of San Jose is doing a lot to take money from me, but doing very little in return. I guess this can be said of any government. A lot of my fellow libertarian-thinkers like to favor local (state, county, city) over federal, but this is just a gentle reminder that even the smaller governments will screw you over as much as possible.

Robbed

On Sunday, I took my kids to the Oakridge Mall. We often go there on Sundays to get ice cream and to play at the indoor playground there. That's exactly what we were doing this past Sunday. As we were walking to our car, I saw a terrible site. Our car had been broken in to. It was my wife's Toyota Sienna. Somebody had broken the driver side window so they could steal the DVD system we had in the car for the kids to watch. It was a portable system we bought over a year ago, with two monitors, one for each of our kids. One of the major selling points for us was that it was portable, so we could use it either in our minivan or in my car. Turns out that this was a selling point for thieves as well.

Needless to say I was pretty furious to have my car damaged and my property stolen. The thief was obviously an idiot. He forgot to take the power cord to the DVD system, so it will not even play for him. Of course the worst part was having to explain to my children what had happened and why they no longer had a "TV in the car."

One of the other disturbing things that came out of all of this was that it led Crystal to discover CrimeReports.com. We went on there and put in our address. It is truly disturbing to see how much crime goes on. It made me depressed to think that maybe we have picked a bad place to live. I scrolled around the Bay Area, and everywhere was pretty bad. Even very expensive areas like Los Gatos showed a huge amount of theft, burglaries, etc. in just the last week.