Ragged

I despise this city sometimes.

Downtown has basically ground to a halt this weekend, due to an impromptu "festival" (it calls itself Freaknik) whose organizers apparently didn't even bother to fill out the proper paperwork and get city permission ahead of time. Still, city officials seem to have decided to accommodate them, and we've ended up with hordes of teenagers/college students/baggy-pantsketeers wandering aimlessly up and down the middle of the street outside my window all weekend long. Or driving around the block in neverending circles. Which has of course resulted in an ever-increasing web of street closures around the loft as the police try to manage the heavy traffic and sidewalk averse pedestrians. What other city would allow a drunken mob to simply shut down the city center for a weekend?

On top of that, neither the gates nor the elevators in the stupid parking decks were working this weekend. This is not unexpected, as the gates only seem to work about 50% of the time, anyway (how hard is it to just fix them??!!???) - but the freaking elevators? All three down at once? Really? And after they were working just fine on Friday night? What the hell?????? Did someone just turn them all off to spite us weekenders? Harrumph.

And then of course, there's the newly-privatized parking ticket service, who have taken it upon themselves to start ticketing on Saturdays and change every single space downtown to "24 Hours Enforced" (previously, ticketing stopped around 5 every day and didn't happen at all on weekends). Because, of course, no one actually lives down here. The city pays lip service to wanting to revitalize downtown and encourage people to live here, and this is the thanks we residents get? This afternoon, I parked in the one space I could find - a 15 Minute Loading space - so I could run up long enough to get a couple of things to take to the new house. I was back within ten minutes, and the rent-an-attendant who was ticketing the car in front of me got all surly because I was leaving before he could ticket me, too. "This is freight loading only!" he scowled. I guess my lamp didn't count as freight.

So, yeah, city of Atlanta - I'm a little pissed today. You can take your privatized parking and shove it straight up your dilapidated sewage system.