A LAWYER’S PERFECT RETIREMENT HOBBY?

AS MANY READERS OF SIMANAITISSAYS MAY KNOW, this website is my ideal hobby in retirement, this latter encouraged by age; nay, forced upon me by Hearst “moving the brand” out of California back in 2012. My last day at R&T was in mid-year—and the inaugural SimanaitisSays (about my Mazda Miata #..000100348) was on August 13, 2012.

Since then, this website has had some 2.5 million views by 1.1 million visitors, to whom I am grateful for reading 4763 postings, each one of which has been good retirement fun in researching and composing. What better hobby after 33+ years as a journalist!

This all came to mind when I read Ed Shanahan’s “Why Did She Rack Up $40,000 in Parking Tickets? Fill in the _____.” The New York Times, November 7, 2026. Shanahan observes, “The next time you are stuck in a dispute with the government bureaucracy, consider Carole Blank Brown and the license plate she had for her red BMW convertible.”

Shanahan explains, “The plate read ‘BLANK,’ for her maiden name. It became an issue this spring when she updated the car’s registration to an Upper East Side address she had moved to several years ago. She soon received two notices about unpaid parking tickets. One, for $65, had been issued in March for a missing license plate. The other, for $95, had been issued in February for blocking a driveway. Both listed the offending license plate number as ‘BLANK.’ ”

First Response. Shanahan recounts, “She said that she and the convertible had never been at the addresses where the violations occurred. ‘This is not my car,’ she wrote in challenging one of the tickets. She called the city’s 311 line and was stunned to learn that more than 400 outstanding tickets totaling more than $40,000 in fines had piled up against her and that only an administrative judge at the Finance Department’s Adjudication Division could resolve them.”

“Ms. Brown,” Shanahan says, “had been pulled into a parking-ticket vortex.”

Don’t Try This at Home, Kids; Attorney Brown is a Professional. “On a Friday in April,” Shanahan relates, “she went to clear her name. Before getting a hearing at an office building in Lower Manhattan, she obtained a list of the hundreds of parking tickets she had supposedly racked up. She also paid more than $400 for copies of them all.”

“Some were for missing plates;” Shanahan notes, “others were for violations like double parking, parking in no-standing zones and blocking fire hydrants. On each one, the space for a license plate number was empty—in other words, blank.”

Pause here to consider the computer whiz who coded this particular NYC programming.

Shanahan continues, “In her written challenges to those first tickets, Ms. Brown offered a theory that the blank space had somehow been conflated with her BMW’s plate. When her turn for a hearing came, there were so many tickets to deal with that one administrative judge could not handle them all. Instead, Ms. Brown had to bounce between four judges over two days to get all the tickets dismissed as the judges examined them one by one.”

No doubt Ms. Brown was familiar with adjudication. Indeed, maybe as a retired lawyer she came to enjoy this aspect of her retirement. Like my website (and GMax fooling), it certainly proved to be time-gobbling.

Her Hobby Grows. “Anxious to avoid getting more tickets,” Shanahan recounts, “Ms. Brown surrendered her plate, but the tickets kept coming. (She knew because she kept checking online.) Every couple of weeks, she returned, stopping first at a customer service window for a printout of the tickets, then spending hours before judges. She thinks she went through this at least 10 times, clearing $10,000 in tickets or more on each trip.”

Shanahan writes, “ ‘Everyone knows me there,’ she said, describing how she had started to bring in her lunch and pass the time playing mahjong on her iPad.”

This appears akin to my Internet sleuthing on one thing and another.

“Helped?” A Finance Department spokesman emailed Ms. Brown that she was one of more than 5200 people the advocate’s office had helped so far this year. He did not respond to questions about what caused her problem or how it had been fixed.

I suspect the word “helped” was the spokesman’s, not Ms. Brown’s.

The DMV Responds. Shanahan observes, “The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles also took action. ‘We will never reissue this same plate combination to another registrant.’ ”

So no more “BLANK” plates, along with witticisms such as “F**K T***P” and the like.

I suppose it’s easier than trying to explain matters to the coder.

Ms. Brown’s Response. Her BMW’s new vanity plate that arrived in October: “KNALB.” ds

I wonder about the advisability of PMURT KCUF. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026