It’s Sunday and you’re hung over. You’d like to sit around and make fun of your roommate all day, but you have to pick up Grandma for her doctor’s appointment. Again. So you stumble out of Bryan, hawk some nasty loogies, and go out to fire up the Plymouth-only you can’t find it anywhere. Better call Gammy, because Public Safety has stolen your car. Your day is going to suck.Last school year alone, 3,843 parking tickets were written, generating $65,648 for the school. That’s a lot of dough. “What if you saw a Public Safety officer driving a golf cart with like, dope-ass rims and a really nice stereo,” pondered junior Hannah Thresher, “You’d know it was a good year for parking tickets.” Real mature, Hannah.

One student who fails to find any humor in this sad state of affairs is junior Henry Wells, a victim of the over-zealous Public Safety.

It started out when he was receiving $100 tickets for “parking an unregistered vehicle.” “I had my car registered and everything, but the stupid sticker kept falling off my window,” said Wells. Thinking that the school would drop the fines after he set them straight, he didn’t really worry about the first few tickets.

By the ninth ticket, Public Safety put a boot on his car to force him to pay $900 that he did not have, or even deserve. “I told this Public Safety lady my story and she laughed at me,” said Wells.

Public Safety did not seem to care that Wells didn’t have the money for his bogus tickets, and they had his car hauled off campus to a caged-lot. The bill was given to Wells.

“I felt like my car was being held for ransom. It’s my car and the school that’s supposed to be like this friendly Quaker place was giving me $100 tickets I didn’t deserve and taking my car off campus, knowing that I didn’t have the money to pay for what they were doing,” said Wells. “The worst thing about the situation was that every time I went down to try and reason with P-Safe, they wouldn’t show any compassion at all, and almost seemed proud of what they were doing.”

Wells was eventually able to work out a community restitution program, but only after weeks of pleading and reasoning. He was given 120 hours of work.

I, too, have had to undergo abuse from Public Safety’s parking enforcement.

I drive an old car, a 1971 Plymouth Satellite (badass, I know). This car is my prized possession, my baby, the only thing I own that I really care about and love. I have put so much work into that car, not only the work I had to do to buy it, but also on its engine and what not.

Last year I got a little bored during the fall and decided to freshen up my old engine.

It was a bigger job than I had expected, and took several weeks of labor in the cold parking lot. But everyday I was out there working away. One day I went out to work on it and it wasn’t there. I freaked out. Of course I ended up finding out that Public Safety had taken it..

I wasn’t making a mess. I had paid for a parking spot. But they just assumed it was “abandoned,” something that car will never be as long as I am alive.

When I got the car back, all my greasy tools and parts (that I had tastefully placed underneath my car) were thrown in the back seat. An air conditioning compressor was wedged in behind the driver’s seat making a giant hole in the fabric.

“According to the parking regulations vehicles cannot be abandoned on campus,” said Director of Public Safety Ron Stowe after I asked him why my car was towed. “For issues of safety and appearance, we don’t want to create an environment with abandoned vehicles laying around.”

In other words, when prospective students and their rich parents are touring Guilford, we don’t want the school to look like a bunch of poor, greasy kids are running around in broken down Mopars, much less actually working on them.

Stowe and his cronies take this parking ticket game pretty seriously.

When asked if he ever feels as though the parking enforcement policies at Guilford are a little harsh, Stowe replied with one word, “No.”

What “Public Safety” needs to consider is what type of school Guilford is, what it is supposed to stand for and the principles on which it is founded upon; friendship, compassion, all that Quaker stuff-not making money at the cost of the community.

But until that happens, try putting an old parking ticket underneath your wipers every time you park. That way the Gestapo will think another officer has already given you a ticket, and will roll right by your car in one of their pimped-out golf carts.