You see, if you describe the parking department as a disease, I must be a virus. I am employed as a parking booth attendant. I’m not an enforcer. I’m the person hanging out in the little green booth collecting fees, and while your initial encounter seems to have been with one of my enforcer cousins, the two of us still represent the same department. Thus, I feel charged to respond to your harsh critique of the parking department and the people I call my friends.

Mr. Novak, you describe how you and “your fellow Spartans … absolutely abhor everything (parking) stand(s) for.” That’s harsh, don’t you think? It’s true that many people disagree with the price of parking permits, the price of visitor parking and enforcement policies, but they’re pieces of a system designed to bring order to Michigan State, not chaos. There are about 4,900 faculty and academic staff members who work for MSU. How many of them live off campus and commute to work? Of the about 36,000 undergraduate students and 11,000 graduate and professional students, how many commute to or have a car on campus? MSU may have a formidably large campus, but that doesn’t mean space for convenient parking is indefinite.

You address us as your “Machiavellian adversary,” but you’re giving us too much credit. The term Machiavellian reflects cunning, deception and amorality. To the charge of cunning, we are very much a part of a bureaucratic system; we’re anything but sly or sharp. To the charge of deception, the enforcement vehicles you so detest are clearly labeled and signs describing parking rules are posted almost every 50 feet. To the final charge of amorality, the parking department enforces the laws determined by our government. The beauty of a democracy is that, if you disagree, you can act to change those laws.

As an employee of MSU’s parking department, I’m often judged before people even let me say, “Hi” when they roll up to my window. They lash out against all of us simply because of who we work for, but the parking department only hires current students enrolled at MSU. We don’t plan on being college students for the rest of our lives. So the next time you accuse us of “mull(ing) about (our) average, oh-so-ordinary lives,” I ask that you remember we’re students, same as you.

Oh, and if you’re still wondering what I do to “occupy (my) time” in my parking booth, I’m studying to go to law school.

Bernadette Bacero, interdisciplinary studies in humanities and pre-law senior