A Murphy’s Law Day

I finally decided to blog about an instance of a day my coworker and I had a few weeks ago. It’s a day where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Let me start out by saying, I’ve told this story to a few people, including my husband. As I was telling it each and every time, I even thought I was lying.

It started out, Dimitri decided to order lunch from one of our favorite lunch haunts, Kenny’s. I ordered over the phone in advance so we could just pick it up. Dimitri decided to grab their lunch deal there.

We went to Kenny’s around 12:00, lunch time. We parked where we usually park, in front of Kenny’s Sub Shop. We walked in to get our lunch. No line or anything. In the midths of paying for our food, the lady from the counter said “Uh oh, some body’s car is being towed”. It was Dimitri’s.

He ran out to tell the tow truck not to tow his car. I was still trying to pay for my food. The tow truck driver said to give him $50 in cash to drop it. Dimitri said he didn’t have it. The guy then said to go to the ATM around the corner.

Dimitri went back into Kenny’s and told me what he was doing. The guy, not to my knowledge, was still proceeding to tow the car. Dimitri was gone, maybe five minutes, getting money from the ATM. I was in Kenny’s, thinking the tow truck driver would keep his word and all would be okay. The tow truck driver then started to drive away. I started to run after him, trying to flag him down.

Dumbfounded, I called Dimitri. While he was coming back, I stopped two cops that were heading into Kenny’s. I asked if they saw anything wrong with the spot. There was no sign for handicap parking or anything. There was a sign a few spaces in front of Qdoba, but it didn’t label the spot we were parked in. The cops were totally on our side and said there was no reason anyone should have towed our car. We then decided to call the same tow place that was on the Qdoba sign, on the off chance it was them who towed it. They didn’t have record of Dimitri’s car. We then called the police. The two officers were nice enough to give us the number. The MoCo police said they’d come investigate.

We called the tow truck place again. We even had the cops on the phone telling them to bring the car back, that the space was a legitimate space to park. They said they didn’t have anyone that could tow our car back. Whatever. We had to go there.

I quickly ate my lunch before the cops showed up. I also called Mike to come get us, but the cops came there before Mike could. When they got there, they looked around and found a tiny sign as you go up the hill saying “Qdoba Parking Only”. NO sign or label on the space or the spaces around it. We had parked there 293 times before.

We asked the cops if they could give us a ride to the tow place. They were nice enough to agree but what a pickle. The cop didn’t know the area and we had to call the place several times for an address and directions. My GPS messed up and thought I was on a road I wasn’t… Yay, Verizon. After driving around a few times, passing the sub shop like three times, the cop finally found the place. A little crappy place that operated out of a trailer, of which had no steps. The gate was chained up with a pad lock. The fence looked like it was ready to fall over but at least the barbed wire at the top was intact.

The same dude who towed us walked out and said it would be $115 to get the car back. Dimitri said he said $50 then towed him away. The guy, total jerk, the very definition of a-hole, said he needed $115 to get the car back. Dimitri kept his cool and asked if there was an ATM around since they didn’t take credit cards. The guy said there was a credit union close and pointed us in that direction, and, for our hassle and his arrogance, he knocked off $15.

We then walked to the credit union. As luck would have it, the ATM was out of order. We asked people walking by if they knew of another one. We even stopped by a few little restaurants to see if they’d run a card and give us money, with no avail. Some people said in some government building a few blocks over. We went there, walked right in and were promptly stopped by security.

We then had to walk all the way to the main entrance and sign in, go through a medal detector, be patted down, and have a security guard personally walk us to the ATM. We finally got the money and headed back.

When we got back, the dude at the gate said it would be $115. Dimitri said the one dude before said $100. He had the dude get on the phone to the other dude. He finally agreed, $100. If not, we would have to walk all the way back to the ATM again, so at least that went okay.

They let us retrieve the car so we went back to work. The whole fiasco took two hours.

Ugh, anyway, at least nothing else went wrong that day.