Parking Enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin

From 11 September 2023 until 16 January 2026, I was employed as a parking enforcement officer at the University of Texas (Austin). 

The absolute best part of the job was the occasional postings to the Pickle Research Center because the food was excellent; I worked alone; and the population there was even a little smarter than the community at the main campus. They made it easy to be lenient, helpful, and informative; and I could still issue ten citations on any day. 

On the main campus, I enjoyed the outreach tables
to give insulated drink mugs along with other merch and swag
to anyone who came up and asked a question.

This was my longest run of W-2 employment since 1991-1993 at Kawasaki Robotics USA, following 1973-1975 with Montgomery Ward & Co; both of those lasting 1 year and 50 weeks. My theory of labor value was informed by Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975). My time at Kawasaki, where I taught robot operations and programming, derived from having read (in 1989) William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Job Description Summary

• Provides university parking services by enforcing University rules and regulations. 
• Ensures that parking regulations are enforced and assists the public with information, such as directions to buildings and offices. 
• Provides assistance to the public by giving parking directions and checking parking permits on vehicles entering the parking lots. 
• Directs flow of traffic and parking of cars. 
• Issues pass-through or visitor's permits when needed. Issues traffic and parking violation citations. 
• Acts as Relief Guard to perform a combination of kiosk guard duties and parking enforcement assistant (PEA) or ticket writer functions. 
• Performs preventative maintenance checks on vehicles. 
• Installs and removes immobilization devices. 
• Controls parking access to surface lots during special events and other university sponsored activities. 
• Resolves or refers parking issues as appropriate. 
• May provide security functions at Pickle Research Center (PRC) to include patrolling buildings and grounds on foot or in vehicles to check for prowlers, fires, water leaks, and general building security.  
• May report all irregularities, emergencies, or suspicious activity to the University Police Office. 
• May be required to rotate locations across campus, including satellite locations.  Other duties as assigned.
• WORKING CONDITIONS: Exposure to variable weather conditions and shift work with varying days off, occasional weekend and overtime.

Despite claiming to be a major research university and even after then-UT president Jay Hatzell declared academic year 2024-25 to be “The Year of AI” the societal dominance of the UT sports cartel is one of the reasons that I left. In our department, we wore UT blood orange tops on Fridays. It was allowed on other days but basic blue was always encouraged. During the football season, we were allowed to wear team jerseys and other UT-branded tops. I wore a “Texas Economics” t-shirt and was told that it did not meet standards because it had no collar. On a following Friday, I put a “Texas Science” t-shirt over a collared blood orange top and was told flat out by the manager who encouraged the football jerseys that this was not within the guidelines for dress. I replied, “It’s spirit day. We can wear UT gear.” His reply: “There are no spirit days.” The diminution of spirit was a constant problem for me.

I found people with a good sense of life at UT, for example at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum and the College of Fine Arts. I enjoyed interacting with them, even when writing citations for the students at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. When I volunteered at the Museum of Science everyone on the staff was enthusiastic, even when acknowledging the existence of unsolved problems at their desk. However, in the parking department eudaimonia was scarce.

This is how student athletes, especially football players, spend their NIL money. 

See recent college athlete valuations at Fox Sports here. 

Parking is like any other game: there are rules and penalties and everyone knows

what they are. The athletes enjoy being able to scoff at the fines 

so that in a community of 55,000 students and 22,000 staff and faculty

served by 13,000 parking spaces they can park wherever they want.

Athletes are given garage parking spaces as part of their scholarship payments. 

As one coach told me, "We don't have a parking problem. We have a walking problem." 

Contract buses take the football players from their lockers

at Moncrief Neuhaus to the Denius practice field less than a mile away and bring them back. 

I believe that it is why they have a hard time winning: they lack a competitive edge.

In 1982, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg moved from Harvard to UT. In 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. [In 2023], coach Steve Sarkisian was paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earned $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. (NecessaryFacts; January 21, 2025.) 

Ahead of the 2025 playing seaon, Arch Manning’s NIL payments were tallied at $6.8 million. (https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/top-25-college-athletes-highest-nil-valuations) That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

[I believe that Stanford science and Harvard economics put into proper context their very successful footballers. See “Stanford Alumni in the NFL Playoffs” here and football at Harvard here.  

See also Harvard Players Health Study ]

These performing arts students called in a complaint
on a professor who parked in the wrong space.
The citation is on the windshield.

The Human Resources department sent me a questionnaire about my separation. “On a scale of 1 to 10…” Most of it was for academics and managers. Some was for me and mine. At the end were two short essay questions. 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely am I to recommend UT as a place to work. I gave it a 3. 

• About a decade before I came to the University of Texas, I was earning my degrees while working part time for a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I knew that no one there knew who I was or cared. What mattered most was my boss, my co-workers, and our clients and their customers. The University of Texas is like that: 55,000 students; 22,000 staff and faculty; deep in the Heart of Texas. All that mattered was the supervisors I could talk to on a first name basis, my team, and the community which we served. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience at the University?

• I loved the museums and I really will miss the libraries. The semester-long checkouts made both research and casual reading very easy, whether writing about the history of physical science and its intersection with the fine arts or catching up on nineteenth century essayists. Occasionally, my daily work let me chat with students and faculty in the performing arts; they are always so interesting. All of that can be hard to find in one place in the private sector. But in the free market, I can make my own opportunities. Here, the paths were fewer and somewhat tangled with undergrowth.

Signage often provided an opportunity
to discuss semantics and sociology. 

I applied for eight other openings on campus, three of them in my own department, and I never got an interview. I adhere to Maslow's Hierarchy. I work for (1) transcendence and (2) self-actualization, (3) my team and (4) our clients, and then I consider (5) the money. This was not the best environment for me and there is more money elsewhere.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed

AFK: Parking Enforcement 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

This Knife Might Not Work Once

This Northwest Trail knife is built wrong. Clipped into your pocket, when you take it out, you have to flip it around before you can open it. You get what you pay for.

My neighborhood Walmart is my pharmacy and I enjoy walking the store while waiting for my presscription. The abundance of stuff speaks to our deep, broad, and wide prosperty, a direct consequence of the market economy. Free markets = free minds. Usually, as much as I like looking, I seldom buy. However, over the years, working in physical security and serving in the Texas Military Department, I have bought extra gear. I learned that lesson from a classmate in criminology. She looked into the trunk of my car and said, "You only have stuff for yourself. I always carry extra." 

And you can always use an extra knife. I never leave home without at least one knife and at least one way to make a fire. That was a lesson from a team-building exercise when I worked for Coin World. We had a series of monthly Monday morning meetings to get to know each other in order to improve our quality of worklife. There were about 40 of us from Coin World, Linn's, Scott's, the press operators, and pre-press at about six or eight tables. The last exercise was a survival scenario.

You are coming home from a vacation in South America with the team mates at your table. Your plane hits a storm and you go down. You crash land. The pilot is killed. The plane is unflyable. The radio does not work. You are all mostly all right. You have to come out together. This is an inventory of what you all packed on your vacation. Golf clubs... a bottle of rum... a .38-cal handgun with six bullets... a Christmas candle... and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember. Not everyone got out. One team gave up right away and decided to settle in place for the rest of their lives. The one press operator on our team said that she was going out on her own. I said that in real life I would join her and leave them behind, but we all have to come out togther, that's the rules. I told my team mates to leave the gun and the rum or not everyone is going to make it. They ignored that. One guy said to bring the gun so that we could fire it into the air to attract natives who would help us. I thought that was a bad idea on several levels. He asked why I wanted the Christmas candle. I replied, "To help make a fire." He said that we are in a jungle and can build a fire anytime. He said to bring the golf clubs. "Whatever for?" I asked. "To make a stretcher and carry someone who is wounded or to kill small game." The others saw the wisdom in both of those plans. You see, this guy was obviously the de facto leader, well known and well liked. It went on for about 45 minutes. Then they gave us the answer from the back of the book.

According to the Army Rangers, you stay with the plane for 72 hours. Someone knows you are missing. They will come looking for you. The plane is unflyable. If you hear help coming you can set it on fire as a signal. In any case, after 72 hours, set it on fire anyway and head out. Find a stream and follow it downhill. Somewhere near the water's edge, probably at the mouth of the river, you will find a village. Whatever you took, you always need a knife and a way to make fire.

Since that day in AD 2000, I never leave home without at least one knife and at least one way to make a fire. 

How many knives do you need? How many can you carry? As the public affairs officer for the Maritime Regiment of the Texas State Guard, I went out with our dive team several times. One time on shore, one of the divers was fussing with some line and needed to cut his knife free. He reached around left and right and went for the leg he was sitting on and then tried to lean over his tanks to grab his pack. I handed him one of mine. His unit leader saw that. "Don't you always have three knives?" he barked. "Well, yeah, but this one is tied up and ... " His leader shook his head and walked away. 

I do not know what I will do with the Northwest Trails knife. I won't toss it out, but I cannot have it for an everyday carry. My Victorinox is my EDC. When I retired from the TXSG, I stopped carrying the Benchmade that I always clipped to the right pocket of my ACUs. The Benchmade works the way a knife is supposed to. I still need a replacement for civilian life. (See, also Gibbs's Rule #9 from NCIS.) You can always use an extra knife; and in the worst case, it only has to work once.

When I was learning to fly, I was coming in a bit low, and the instructor pushed the yoke forward for a little more airspeed and lift. When we were done, he asked, "What you have done if you had come down in the bean field at the end of the runway?" I replied, "Stay with the plane 72 hours, then set it on fire and walk in to the terminal." 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Genius of Design

Objectified

Documentation is Specification

Leadership

Hackers Heart Small Talk

Social engineering is the gathering of computer system information by other means.

T-Shirt from Defcon 24

It is common for Internet companies to rely on standard software. Even when provided by competing firms, the forms and formats of presentation are necessarily similar.  

What was your childhood pet's name?
What street did you grow up on?
What was the make of your first car?
What is your mother's maiden name?

The last line on the t-shirt is hard to read because it is on the midriff:  Is your voice your passport?  is a reference to Sneakers, the hacker film with Robert Redford, River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd, James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier, Mary McDonnell, and Ben Kingsley.     

Other popular keys to your files include
Who was your favorite teacher?
In what city did your parents meet?
What city did you grow up in?
What high school did you attend?
What was your favorite subject in school?

It is not so much that you cannot trust your co-workers (though there is that), but that you cannot know who else is listening when you are out in public socializing with your colleagues.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Hacking
Passwords
BSides 2016
Securing Your Viper from Cylons
When Old Technologies Were New

BSides Austin 2016

The seventh annual BSides Austin computer security conference ran March 31-April 1, 2016. I served as a Host for breakout sessions, introducing speakers, and keeping track of time. It was an overflow crowd of 350 with 150 turned away at the door, or denied a slot on the wait list. In addition, several student groups could not be accommodated at all. 

 

Breakfast with the Sponsors.

We had two tracks on Thursday and three on Friday. You can find the full schedule on the conference website here.  Many of the sessions were easy to label. “I am a Software Developer. What do you mean I’m on the Blue Team?” by Aaron Poffenberger was clearly for the Blue Team. “It’s not About the Technology. It is About the Psychology” by Dr. Hend Ezzeddine and Flora Moon was easy to label for Social Engineering.

 

32 Formal Technical Sessions
The first night also included open mike
"Fire Marshall Talks"

But many others crossed several lines on the corporate org chart, and the sessions were not narrowly defined. You had to pick your presentations. That said, all of the hands-on workshops were held in the same room on the same day.

 

Rapper "Dual Core"

Each track had a Host and a room Monitor.  The monitors counted the room three times (beginning, middle, end) and interfaced with the hotel staff when needed.

 

Waiting for the Keynote by Ed Skoudis from SANS.

The convention would have cost ten times as much to attend were it not for the sponsors. 

Digital Defense, Rapid 7, SANS, and Splunk were gold sponsors this year. 

The silver sponsors were RSA, Log-MD, ISSA, Pluralsight, Checkmarx,
Anomali, and Netskope.

The five core sponsors were Velocitystorm, Expressworks,
Fusion-X (thanks for the beer!),
No Starch Press, and Pentester Academy.

As a technical writer, my interests are more general. I am seldom held accountable for information security, except as we all are. These were among my take-aways:

• The best lockpicking tools for the money are the Sparrow Tuxedo ($40) and the Tremendous Twelve by Toools from Southern Specialties ($30). 
• The best locks are biaxials from Medeco and the Schlage Primus. You can spend $75 for one of these and secure your servers, or you can buy a dozen others at $5.95 each and let us all have access to your servers.
• For a knowledge worker your credibility is your product. 
• The highest priorities for information security should be Asset and Inventory Management, Decision and Remediation Workflows, and Visualization and Metrics. The lowest priorities are vulnerability assessment and scanning, penetration testing, and buying cool tools. 
• Work the OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities. 
• Amateurs target systems. Professionals target people. 
• Security will not be accepted until and unless IT is made personal: it is you in your home who will be violated by your release of company information at work.

Basic security

They call it “BSides” in honor of the old rock ‘n’ roll 45 rpm single releases of the 1950s and 60s. The producer picked a hit for Side A and put something else (usually mediocre) on Side B. Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” was an exception. The Beatles releases were all exceptions.

Presentations crossed organization lines

The concept began in the US in 2009 with Mike Dahn, Jack Daniel, and some others because the CFP [Capture the Flag: computer intrusion challenge – MEM] for Black Hat Vegas or DEF CON was oversubscribed and those unable to present decided to hold their own conference on the 'b side'. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSides

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Brian Krebs’ Spam Nation  

Your Cell Phone is Not Safe 

BSides Austin 2015 

LASCON: The Lonestar Application Security Conference 2014 

BSides Austin 2013 

Locksporting 

Bleeding Data: SXSW Interactive Proposal

With new data breaches appearing in the news every day, how can anyone protect their information? With a few simple tools - which we will demonstrate - you can dramatically improve the privacy of your personal information. 

Among the tools that we will provide and explain are Secunia PSI; KeePass Password Manager; and OpenDNS.

We chose those and other tools because they have high reputational value in the computer security community. They are easy to use. They specifically protect the most vulnerable aspects of your information flow. 

We will guide the workshop attendees through the installation and use of the tools. Tutors from the Austin computer security community will be on hand to provide individual instruction.

Selection of SXSW Interactive workshops and panels is, in part, by open voting. To vote and view the proposal video click here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/50060

You can view the video directly on YouTube here:

You can read more about how to protect your personal information on Laurel's blog, IntentionalPrivacy.

Also on NecessaryFacts:

Open Secrets

The Code Book

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

Basic: Turing's Truth

Peace is More Powerful

Imagine a successful protest in Berlin 1943 against the Holocaust.  Between February 27 and March 6, about 200 German women stood outside a detainment center, demanding the release of their Jewish husbands.  Between March 1 and March 12, although 25 were sent to Auschwitz, about 2,000 prisoners were let go. Soon, they were picked up again, but sent to work in labor camps in Berlin and other cities where they lived out the war. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here.

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (Columbia University Press, 2011, ppb 2012) grew out of a challenge. As a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she believed “back then [2006] power flows from the barrel of a gun.” What changed her mind was a challenge from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict to prove her point.

Non-violent campaigns succeed more often.
They win compromise more often.
They fail completely less often.
(Chenoweth ICNC Webinar)

Chenoweth worked with Maria J. Stephan to gather data from every anti-government action since 1900 for reform or independence, whether violent or non-violent.  They published a paper, with only three exemplary cases, but dense with the mathematics of sociology parodied so well by Tom Lehrer (YouTube here). Nonetheless, they proved their point.  From that paper came several lectures and a book of narratives.

• International Center on Nonviolent Conflict Webinar (1hr 4min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Beep0xnonvk
• “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of  Nonviolent Conflict by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth,” International Security, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 7–44  http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.7
• TEDx Boulder: September 2013 (12 minutes 33 secs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w

This new work by Chenoweth and Stephan validates earlier examinations, such as "A Force More Powerful" about peaceful resistance to modern dictatorships. 

DENMARK - LIVING WITH THE ENEMY:  By the summer of 1943, in the midst of World War II, Denmark had been occupied by German forces for more than three years. Resistance to the invaders was sporadic, mainly limited to displays of Danish cultural identity or scattered acts of sabotage. But then, provoked by German brutality, the Danes acted more boldly to resist the Nazi war machine. Mass nonviolent direct action began first with labor strikes. Then, when SS troops arrived to round up Danish Jews for deportation to the death camps, the Danes rescued their fellow citizens, ferrying most to safety in Sweden. The effort galvanized many Danes, and soon general strikes challenged German control. The Danish underground emphasized nonviolent operations. Although Denmark was not liberated until the end of the war, nonviolent resistance stymied German plans for extracting value from the occupation.  ("A Force More Powerful" from PBS here).
  

"Researchers used to say that no government could survive if just 5 percent of the population rose up against it," Chenoweth says. "Our data shows the number may be lower than that. No single campaign in that period failed after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population." She adds, "But get this: every single campaign that exceeded that 3.5 percent point was a nonviolent one. The nonviolent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns." – from Chenoweth’s TEDx Talk reported by Max Fisher, Washington Post, November 5, 2013 here. 

 

Non-violent campaigns (right) are more likely
to draw defections from the government
security forces.
Chenoweth ICNC Webinar.

The empirical results from Chenoweth and Stephan only validate many other narratives of successful peaceful resistance.  The American Civil Rights campaign took its lead from the independence movement in India led by Mohandas Gandhi.  That and many other stories – Chile, the Ukraine, Serbia – are told in A Force More Powerful, the premier product in a series of videos about social change through peace, produced by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. 

Confronting the Truth is another ICNC video explaining “truth and reconciliation campaigns.”  Perhaps the best known grew out of the genocide in Rwanda.  Rather than seeking punitive retribution, the commission's motive was to let the perpetrators admit their guilt and express their sorrow to the survivors.  Other commissions have worked in Peru, South Africa, East Timor, and Morocco. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Laissez Faire Criminology 

Active Defense and Passive Aggression 

Alternatives to Prison 

Money as Speech and Peacemaking  

Open Secrets

A popular TED Talks from Johanna Blakley (view here), showed that revenues in the fashion industry where intellectual property rights are weak are three orders of magnitude greater than in sectors with strong intellectual property rights.  In "Bourgeois Virtue (link here)" Deirdre McCloskey cited Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as one of many examples of the importance of discourse to commerce: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following...  What news on the Rialto?"  Modern insurance and modern banking both have origins in the coffeehouses of London. The great value in urban culture is that communication is profitable.  

Openness brings risk.  We all take the keys from the car and lock the doors when we leave it parked. But for 100 years collectivists right and left declared that our open society would be easy to infiltrate and destroy. We're here. The Nazis and Communists are gone. Today, the open society, the agora, is attacked by new enemies who fear knowledge.  While the need to secure our infrastructure is clear, it is more important to maintain, reward and enhance the creation and  transmission of information, money, goods, services, and people.

In Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics Jane Jacobs identified the dichotomy between the commercial ethos and the guardian way. Secrecy is important to police forces, armies, charities, and socialist economies.  On the other hand, scientists, farmers, and merchants depend on open communication.

Your computer is the result of a completely open and unregulated market in cybernetics.  No government agency defines what a computer is, who can build one, who can own a computer or who is qualified to program one.   The USSR excelled in theoretical mathematics and chess because the people of the mind, the initiators, the doers, the contrarians had no other outlet.  Politics was forbidden and economics did not exist. Meanwhile, in America, personal enterprise continued to blossom and bear fruit.

In 1991, I was a delegate from the Michigan patron community to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services (WHCLIS-2).  Among the guest speakers was Newt Gingrich.  As a result of that, I sent a check to GOPAC and benefited from being on their mailing list for audio tapes.  At some $100-a-plate dinner Dr. Gingrich said that at a previous dinner, someone asked him if he did not think that it was horrible that welfare recipients sell their food stamps for 75 cents on the dollar to buy booze and cigarettes.  The professor said, "Of course not."  These people are Americans, he said.  "You cannot give an American a negotiable instrument and then complain when they negotiate it for something they want."

In April 2009, I attended a presentation by former KGB agent Boris Yuzhin. (See New York Times story "Graying Double Agent" here.  Visit his Wikipedia biography here. Read the ZoomInfo sketch here.)

As he told it, trained in computer architecture, he was recruited by the KGB to come to American and find others to work for the USSR. The KGB heard that there were a lot of "communists" at Berkeley, so they sent him there. Not only did none of the comrades want to talk to him, when they did, it was a debate -- and he lost. He could not win a debate on Marxism because in the USSR they could not read all of the theoretical works which we in the USA can. So, he got a carrel at the library and began studying Marxism in the USA.  That convinced him of the strength of an open society. He defected to our side.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Engines of Creation
The Genius of Design
Venture Capital
Entrepreneurship