It costs $740 to buy a parking permit for my university. Considering that this university rakes in approximately $35,000-$36,000 from each student per year (tuition plus room and board), this is $740 that my university does not need. Never mind, of course, that we also have one of the largest endowments in the country.

I've come to understand this huge fee as a way to keep people like me from driving to campus. The university provides free, albeit unreliable, shuttles for students who live off campus. This way, they don't need to offer more parking and can continue to eat up every square foot of free space with more and more buildings. $740 certainly deters me from driving to campus.

But, every now and then, I have to drive. I live a mere mile from campus and have waited for over a half an hour for that shuttle. Other days, I'm simply running late and need to get to class. So I drive. And I receive a parking ticket. These are $25.

These also are distributed in little yellow envelopes and are placed beneath the windshield wipers of the offending cars. This has me thinking.

What if I kept that parking ticket beneath the windshield wipers of my car? What if it always looked as though I had already been penalized and, secretly, I was only paying $25 for a parking pass? Is that evil? Would they tow my car? I'm so damn curious.

No one wants to waste that much money on friggin' parking.

On this same subject, there was an extremely witty editorial in my university's newspaper a couple of weeks ago. Some student wrote that she forked over the dough for a parking pass, because she had to drive to campus. She couldn't believe how expensive it was.

And then her car broke down. She couldn't afford to fix it because she had spent so much money on the parking pass. Ironic, huh?

I sure as hell thought so. I wonder if the potential of saving $715 is worth the hassle of a towed car. That's an awfully easy question, isn't it?