Kicked when you're Down

Sometimes life gives you lemons and you need to take them and make lemonade. Sometimes when you are making that lemonade, another kid comes and knocks over the jar, steals your money, trips you, and then kicks you before he runs away. Last week, we had something a little like that (if you'll allow me to be so dramatic).

As if it wasn't bad enough that our child is in critical condition and we're relocated to an unfamiliar city to care for him, the San Francisco parking enforcement gave us a ticket for illegally displaying Roscoe's disabled placard in our car:

You probably noticed that there's an $880 ticket for misuse of the placard and $64 for parking fees, for a total of $944. On top of that, they took the disabled placard because it had been "misused" and invalidated it. We explained to the officer that UCSF had told us we were allowed to use the placard going to and from seeing him (after all, this housing was arranged by UCSF and he is housed at UCSF). We asked for a warning, but the officer said he'd already called it in and now the placard was invalid. I guess we lucked out that 1-2 weeks ago San Francisco made a public effort to start cracking down on illegal disabled placard usage.

The next day, I had to go early to the DMV to get a new disabled placard. I arrived 15 minutes before they opened and heres what the line looked like when I got there (the door is around the corner):

... and here's the part of the line behind me before we went in:

Thankfully there were no other issues in getting the replacement disabled placard, so now we just have to write in to protest the $944 in tickets that were issued. I am fairly certain that with an explanation of what happened along with a doctor's note, the fines will be forgiven. Needless to say, it sure doesn't help to get kicked when you're down.