So, you feed the meter, and run your errands, knowing the thin metal beast seems to get hungry rather quickly.
Too quickly in fact for several people who've parked in Ridgewood in recent years.
Mey-Ling had been wondering about this: the expired meter ticket she got in 2009 near the Ridgewood train station.
Ms. King parked at the station only long enough to pick up a friend coming on the train.
She said she put more than enough money in the meter for the time she'd be there.
"Somebody said, you better hurry, you're getting a ticket," said Mey-Ling King, a Ridgewood resident.
That's where the question comes in.
She still had time on the meter.
Apparently, this was happening to quite a few people around town.
"I heard people were taking pictures of the meters," said Kim Fiske, a Ridgewood businessman.
Ms. King was one of them.
"Took out my phone, took a picture of the meter, called the police department," King said.
This week, there was a possible answer.
Police reportedly arrested 29-year-old Christopher Foxon of Garfield.
He's a parking enforcement officer, and police say he wrote the bogus tickets, and then made up excuses to dismiss them when drivers challenged them.
"They said mine was a meter malfunction," King said.
"I just can't believe it," Fiske said.
Reports are, a police investigation tied Foxon to the tickets, and that he was arrested charged with tampering with an official document.
King has kept her dismissed ticket for three years and is glad she didn't just pay it and forget it.
"I thought, how many other people did he do that to? It's not right," King said.
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