God, how I hate getting tickets! Don’t the police have better things to do than scrounge up revenue by seeking out petty infractions? People are getting killed in our city’s streets and Officer Doughnut Eater is busy seeing if city stickers have been affixed in the proper corner of parked cars.

Get the idea? I really do hate parking tickets.

For me, they seem to come in waves. I will go for years between spying that most heart-sinking of all orange colored envelopes between my wiper blade and windshield. Then I will seem to get 2 or 3 in a couple weeks. Sometimes, I will just pay them right away, chalking up receiving a violation notice to a bad gamble I took knowingly trying to skirt some silly, but clearly posted, restriction. And sometimes, I will huff for weeks, refusing to pay the fine because I feel like a victim of inadequate notice or an unfairly enforced rule. In Chicago, getting parking tickets seems like an unavoidable curse. I experienced one of those waves recently, getting two tickets within one week.

I got the first ticket, a night parking violation, while trying to avoid a ticket for street cleaning. In my neighborhood, once a month, they make it illegal to park in half the available parking spots from 9:00 AM until 3:00 PM while a strange, single-seat white vehicle with rotating brushes travels down the east and south sides of the streets one day and down the north and west sides the next day. On a “street cleaning” day, with a shortage of available spaces, I grabbed what I thought was simply nightime restricted parking (illegal from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM) only to find when I retrieved my car at 5:29, that it was illegal to park there after five when the Cubs were playing a night game. The second ticket was for not having a new state license plate sticker purchased and in place in time. On this one, I simply forgot. All told, damages came to $110, not counting the $20 late fee for renewing my plates after July 31st.

I was fuming about this double whammy when I got an unexpected phone call from Peter B, a travel excursion organizer from Toronto.

“So,” the voice on the other line began with a sort of fake enthusiasm. “Have you missed me?”

I was hoping I could get him to talk longer so I could figure out who was calling and hitting me with such a corny old line. Eventually, I figured it out.

As a part-time city highlights guide, I had escorted some of Peter’s senior groups around town. He wanted to see if I was available to guide a group of his in a week, on a Saturday morning when I had nothing else to do. Let’s see, I thought, I would be able to bill him $120 for a few hours work. There could be tips too, although with seniors that was hard to count on. According to my best estimation, this unexpected assignment would pretty much exactly cover my equally unexpected contribution to Chicago’s Revenue Department.

And then I remembered the theory of “Compensating Flatches.”

My friend Nancy, who is an engineer, first introduced this natural law to me. She used to have a boss, an old-school, pocket protector wearing engineer, who explained the law of compensating flatches to his staff. The law works something like this… If something goes wrong on a project or plan, which it inevitably will, you should never worry about it because at least one or two other things will go wrong, or change directions again after that point, which will render the first problem or detour of no consequence.

While I know this is not the same as making three right turns at an intersection where it is impossible to make a left turn, and I recognize Peter’s out of the blue call was not exactly another problem that eradicated the painful rash of orange windshields I was experiencing. Still, it is an incredibly empowering thought. Lots of unexpected things can feel like major setbacks, but in the bigger scheme of things, more often than not, something else will come up to mitigate or offset those things that make you feel cursed.

Remembering the Law of Compensating Flatches is no small thing.