Everybody’s dream of hell must include the NIU parking division. And just when you thought hell was as bad as it could get, the parking division comes up with a new twist.

Yes, even the parking division is becoming computerized. The newest line of technology in making people’s lives miserable is a little computer that will record the perpetrator’s license plate number and all the other stupid information they take so they can find you anywhere you try to run to avoid paying them.

Some of us have so many tickets, our license numbers probably are in the computer permanently.

The parking division always has claimed it is a service to the university. To the university—maybe, to the students—not.

No one would know this better than a few of the employees at The Northern Star. Pooling the Star’s parking tickets together, we have helped to build most everything on campus for the last five years.

With these new little computers, the parking division wants to cut down on clerical errors. It’s good to know they make them because they are probably going to receive a few clerical errors that happened to have been left on a certain columnist’s car.

Not that parking isn’t really important, it is. Heck, if they didn’t sell those extra 2,000 permits, they wouldn’t have been able to put up a nice new building for the parking vultures to hang out in.

The money collected from tickets and permits also is supposed to help the university be able to repave parking lots, as was the case with the Neptune Hall D-lot. But many students said they are not happy with the reconstruction and parking by Neptune Hall is still horrendous.

The most amazing part of the parking division is the homing devices that they must give their employees. Before you have even locked your car, they are there with the ticket already made out.

The troubles that can be bestowed upon one for refusing to pay their tickets is unreal. If you do not pay even something as minimal and trivial as a $2 ticket, an encumbrance will be placed upon your records. This means that, even though you have paid your tuition in full, you won’t get any classes.

The easiest solution would be to not get tickets but let’s face reality, that’s like telling a parking person to get some compassion. Everybody gets a ticket at one time or another, although some of us seem to be stuck in a “one time or another” time warp.

There are a few simple ways to avoid getting ticketed. The first suggestion definitely comes from experience. Litter your car window with about a hundred tickets and maybe if the parking hounds from hell come around, they’ll figure they have reached their weekly commission and leave you alone.

The second way to avoid ending up in the parking division hall of fame as the Person Who Donated The Most Blacktop is to park illegally and take your license plates with you. Someone actually did that.

Drive a hearse. No, that wouldn’t work. The parking people would ticket a funeral if they could.

Speaking of funerals, the best way to avoid a ticket is if there were no ticket people …