Dude, Where's My Car?

Walking to my car this morning, I was surprised to find a puddle of rainwater in the place where my car was supposed to be. It didn’t help matters that I had locked myself out of Tanner's apartment and I was wearing a short nightgown with pink fuzzy boots. That'll teach me to run out of the house late at night wearing only bed clothes. Luckily, I did remember to bring my cell phone, but it would have been even nicer if I had bothered to put pants on.

I asked a neighbor if he had seen my car. Was it stolen or towed?? Or perhaps kidnapped by aliens? At least I hadn’t been drunk when I parked it. That would have been even worse as my memory would have been fuzzy. At least I knew for sure that the car had been there at 2am last night and was gone at 11am the next day. Then I saw the sign, half covered in graffiti was one of those, "No parking from here to the street" signs that I must have missed at 2am in the rain.

Double damn! But at least the car mystery was solved. The cops directed me to Spillane Towing. The woman who answered the phone was charming. "Yeah, we got yer car, come and get it. We're over by the Pizza Put, what do ya mean you don’t know where that is?"

I waited on the corner for my mother to come and pick me up. Cars whizzed by and starred at my nightgown attire. The Kountry Cup van driver nearly careened into the church he was so busy gawking. I probably could have made some $ on that street corner to pay off my towing fees.

Spillanes is over in South Burlington and the angry woman at the front desk did her best to ignore me despite my chirpy hello. "Close the door," she growled.

"It is closed," I smiled back.

"Is it closed tight?" she barked.

"YES, give me my car!"

$55 smackers and 15 minutes of humiliation later and I was finally ready to go. I tried to take a picture of this lovely lady as I left, "No pictures in here," she spit.

Once I was sitting in the safety of my poor, abandoned car, examining the $45 police ticket, everything felt much better. All is all, the entire experience cost under $100 bucks and took only 1.5 hrs to fix up. Compared to the time I got towed in Oakland, this was a cakewalk.

Years ago, I drove home slightly tipsy from SF and parked in a neighborhood I had recently moved into near the Oakland Rose Garden. I didn’t notice that I was slightly protruding into a driveway. The next day I went out to my car with my friend Nessa and had no idea where the bloody thing had gone. Even worse, I wasn't sure exactly where I had parked which just made me more confused. Once I called the cops and located my car at a compound lot in the depths of Oakland, the painful journey was underway.

We headed to the police station where I had to pay a fine to release the car. The station was in downtown Oakland and there were cops with machine guns in the marble lobby. They sent us up to an empty office where they made us wait for 1/2 hour as they stamped things and filled out paperwork behind bullet proof glass. The entire day was so "Brazil" - slow, surreal and amazing how many retarded hoops we were made to jump through.

We took the freeway out to the warehouse section of town off the 580 and tried to get into the huge car lot which was encircled in menacing barb wire and seemed deserted. Much yelling brought a grumpy, cigar smoking man and a bevy of dogs. He led us into a dilapidated building where we waited hours upon hours as he stamped paper, made phone calls, talked on a walkie talkie and disdainfully took my $200.

"Cash only sweetheart."

Eventually, he drove me through the enormous warehouses where we passed hundreds of other abandoned cars that he said would be sold off soon. Sadly, many people aren’t able to spring their cars from this Automobile Purgatory. When we finally found my little blue Honda Civic covered in toys, I felt a huge sense of relief.

Here is a side by side comparison of towing and the pain it incurs:

Towing in Oakland, $250, time spent: 1/2 day, annoyance scale: 10
Towing in Burlington, VT: $100, time spent: 1.5 hrs, annoyance scale: 5

On a happier note, check out the cutest kittens the world has ever seen: