Stupid rich tricks

Hereabouts, the town issues two sorts of auto permits to those who ask for them and fork over the requisite amount of cash. There is the beach stickah, and there is the dump stickah. One might think the former would be the one with cachet, but the opposite is true. All residents can do with a beach stickah is park at the beach for the few weeks a year when beach conditions are above freezing. A dump stickah allows residents that privilege, as well as access to the transfer station (known to the ancien regime as the incinerator, which it once was), to the recycling centre, to the leaf and brush dump, and to the swap shed, where thrifty Yankees can exchange their trash for someone else's trash. (Think yard sale without money.)

Fastidious newcomers have usually started with a beach stickah, before they overcome their aversion to decorating the family Mercedes with a dump stickah.
The condescending sighs of natives are one motivation. Another is their first autumn, when they find out the town is very stingy with leaf pickup and even stingier with open burning permits. At that moment, newcomers begin to understand the cachet of the dump stickah, which entitles them to a place in the autumn scrum at the leaf pile. The town of late has helped them along by calling the dump stickah a "town facilities permit." (The beach stickah is still just a beach stickah.)

Perhaps this was a bad idea. Traditionally, drivers just stuck the new stickah on top of last year's. When one acquired as many layers as an archaeological site, the whole wad would peel off quite easily. Recently, though, newcomers have begun carefully arraying dump stickahs next to each other, much as people out on the islands line up each year's oversand beach permits.

This has two disadvantages. First, it's the scarlet letter of residency status. The desired effect is to impress people with how many years one has lived here. This is a losing proposition when the family of the guy who plows your driveway may have been here 300 years. Second, most local behaviours have a hard core of common sense behind them. The town seems to have gotten its stickahs from the same place since about the invention of the Model T. The glue is peculiarly stubborn. One stickah at a time won't come off: five or ten piled on top of each other yield to one persistent tug. Thus newcomers will have to endure their humiliation as long as they own their car, and may have hundreds taken off the trade-in value by unsentimental dealers.

Thus do the one percent bite themselves on the ankle.