24th
Blow me Oshawa
FUCK YOU BY-LAW… ok, with that out of the way, time to rant.
Oshawa is falling apart. The city has one thing going for it right now, and that’s the University and College (one thing.. you don’t like my logic, shove it). The one bright thing in Oshawa’s future, the thing that’s actually drawing people to the city and even generating a positive buzz about the city. The one thing to draw attention from cutbacks, layoffs and deportation of jobs to Mexico. As much as I like GM, the plant isn’t exaclty going to bring us out of the crappy state this city is in. Anyways, enough about that, onto the people being drawn to the city. These people would be the 18-20somethings that come to the school to get an education. The people that come here and drop about $20,000.00 each year to pursuit knowledge in the subject of their choice, while living in this city, paying rent, buying food basically just dumping their wallets into the local economy. Now, if I were an astute resident of this fine city, I would be thinking “great, let’s bring more people here!” as we all know, that’s hardly the case and it is usually much more like “those hooligans can’t live here, they’re heathens, with their consumption of alcohol, sexual behaviour and general heathenism!”. riiiiiight
So now every non-student in oshawa has jumped on this anti-student bagon (thank’s Casey for the word “bagon”). Seeing as we’re not real people anyways, we now have to register ourselves witht the SS errr by-law office so they can keep an eye on us. That’s cool, when do we get our armbands?… we’re safe as long as we wear them and keep our papers with us right? I know this is nowhere near as bad as what I’m referencing it to, and I hope to God it never happens again, but it is a similar behavior, if it wasn’t cool then, why is it cool now?
Anyways… By-Law likes to play a little game called “let’s see what kind of tickets we can give to people with DC/UOIT markings on them” I used to have a UOIT sticker on the window of my chariot, that was until I picked up on their little game. By-law likes to patrol our street, chalking tires and giving tickets for whatever they can, as long as the vehicle is in front of a student house. Saturday, we got one for blocking 100% of the sidewalk while parked on our boulevard, the guy down the street parked in the same manner got nothing (there was clearly room to get by, the sidewalk wasn’t blocked). Monday comes and we get another ticket for parking on the boulevard, again, nobody else on the street has a ticket, now I’m pissed off and too frustrated to study for my midterm. Tuseday comes and our next-door neighbour is parked in front of our house (instead of his own for some reason), fine, he’ll get a ticket, he’s been there more than 3 hours, that’s ticketable, also he’s within 2 meters of a driveway, and his right tires are probably more than 2 feet away from the curb due to our wide snowbanks because of people parking on the road, hell he’s even obstructing a snow plow should it come! Funny, no ticket yet, we’ve gotten tickets for all these things (minus the plow one, we’re not that dumb) ohhh right, he’s a cop… now that I think about it, I haven’t seen him get a ticket all year, even on days when we’ve gotten them… oh well, he’s doing a service to us… now what about the rest of these schmuck’s?
We’ve had our road blocked due to people parking on both sides and leaving a 4 foot gap in the middle, bylaw comes out and makes a bs excuse not to give a ticket, likely because the 2 vehicles weren’t stereotypical student vehicles. I have no problem with getting a ticket if I deserve it and am being treated fairly. This whole “justice for all” bullshit is bugging me though, if everybody on my street got tickets when by-law came around, I would be happy, but this is just unacceptable. By-law partols specifically student neighbourhoods, targeting our kind (yeah, our fucking kind, substitute any race for “student” in the proposed bylaws and see what you get), I have followed them around before, it took quite a bit of following, and until they knew damn well i was following them for them to even bat an eye at an illegally parked car.
Back to what I was getting at… (this kind of transition is why my english teachers hated me)… How can Oshawa expect people to want to live here when the city is constantly trying to get them to leave for the duration of their education? I certainly will not work in a city where I’m not welcome, I have absolutely no intention of staying in this city any longer than I have to to complete my education. My theory is that they know damn well that nobody actually wants to live in Oshawa, they’re just getting as much out of us as they can while we’re still here.
/rant
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