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Half a semester and half a football season is in the books, campers! How's the progress on those illegal parking merit badges coming, campers? Let's take a look.
Can't Keep Em Crooked to Keep Em Straight
This kindly little old lady we know runs a kindly little old shop across the street from the kindly little old campus of our kindly old University.
Naturally, this means she often finds people trying to park in her lot who have no intention of shopping there and are looking for free parking close enough to their class that they don't have to get up until 4 minutes before it starts. So we frequently get tows from there, like this girl. What we usually don't get, are ones this scatterbrained when it comes to "quick, make an excuse" time.
-What the hell did I get towed for?
-Where you parked is a private lot, it's for customers of the business only
-But I had to be at my job!
-Doesn't matter, it's customers only, it's signed as such, and the store owner who's run that place for years called you in for the tow.
-Well, you need to do something about the signs down there, because it's not clear you can't park there and go to class!
-Class? Thought you said you were at work?
-Uh.... uh..... uh......
I've heard of giving someone just enough rope to hang themselves, but this person literally choked to death on ambient dust while in line at the rope-cutting counter.
The Tow Files: BANNED IN BOSTON!
Another day, another apoplectic at the front counter raging that he has to pay to get his car back for the crime of not caring enough about where he left it.
The whole crux of this guys argument was that we were a bunch of scammers because what we're doing would be ILLEGAL in PITTSBURGH!
How? Because of the fees? The signage? The time of day? He didn't elaborate, he just wanted us to know, the way it works in this town would be AGAINST THE LAW in Pittsburgh.
Do Tell.
Also, tell me, outside that window over there.
Yinz see any chip chop ham sammiches?
Yinz see any gum bands?
Yinz see any bus headed for "Downtahn" ?
Yinz see the Pirates painfully stumbling towards another losing season?
No?
Well, then I guess this isn't PIttsburg, your argument is invalid.
The Sh*ttiest SC This Week
Had an odd tow. Not in the sense that it was an odd car, you can't get more boilerplate on the highway these days than the Nissan Altima. Nope, it was the "from" and "to" parts of the tow that were nonstandard.
Pickup was at a rental car agency at the Airport.
Drop Off was at Costly Hand Auto Detailers.
Why? I was under the impression that the rental car company had it's own maintenance/cleaning facility out there, I've dropped off there many a time.
Well, they do, and therein lies the issue. NONE of the workers at the facility are willing to touch this car.
What could be the reason for such a mutiny?
Because the guy who rented it last let his dog (or possibly dogs) live in it, and apparently only returned it when the smell of canine feces/urine became too much for him to see the road through the tears in his eyes.
Naturally, nobody else is going to want to get into this rolling manure spreader. Until/unless it's salvageable by an industrial-grade cleansing, it's useless as a rental car.
And it may not be, this is the SECOND time it's been towed over to the detailer, the first visit only reduced the unbelievable stench to a more believable level, it didn't eradicate it enough to loan out the car again to anyone who wasn't a suspected Neo-Nazi.
Manager at the rental place said if this doesn't work, they'll have to write the vehicle off as a loss, send it to a salvage yard, and get a new one.
And here's the kicker, this is the THIRD car said renter has ruined by letting his dogs live in it.
Why do they keep renting to him? Per the manager "I want to refuse to give this guy another car, but regional says we can't risk losing a customer. So we're running up the damage bill in the hope we can convince them to get rid of him"
Way to go Corporate America, you're the shining beacon of logic and intelligence in the world once again. While some of the denizens of this planet can't get enough to eat and only dream of maybe one day owning a car, you have wasted THREE perfectly good ones and a tone of ancillary resources on a guy who can't be arsed to watch where his pets take a dump..... good one.
Seein' Red and Green and Purple and, Everything Short of Burnt Sienna
I would like to stop and take a moment here to extend a "thank you" to the US Department of the Treasury, which over the years has introduced more color to the dollar. For those who don't often get to handle actual real US Currency, like our friendly Aussies, Brits and any liberal arts majors, they've been slowly easing everyone in to using "colored" money over the years by adding a little bit of peach-orange or pale blue to what have always been traditionally green/black notes.
The unintended side effect of this is when someone tries to plead poverty for a tow by opening their billfold and showing the meager contents, well, the old "Put the $1 bill on top of the bigger ones" trick no longer works.
As the guy Spitzilla had hooked up for trying to sneak into the lot of Substandard Taco and leave without patronizing learned.
He tried to argue he only had $4 on him and couldn't possibly pay the $75 drop fee, holding up the wallet for a tug of the ol' heartstrings.
Spiz looked in it and said "There's nothing but purple behind that one, you have more than enough and I'll be happy to make change"
The guy then threatened to get in the car and stay there until Spitz either let him go or was old enough to collect social security.
Spitz told him if he did that he'd be seeing red and blue.... as in red and blue strobe lights, on the roof of the car, that would haul him off to jail, but "go ahead, I haven't seen that in a while, I love it when the cops drag people out of their cars"
The guy paid
He wasn't happy
We really didn't care.
Escalating Quickly
Guy - "I'm here to pick up my car, why'd I get towed? I have a permit"
Me - "Yeah, that permit expired in August"
Guy - "Go F*CK yourself!"
Well, that certainly got right to the point. I can appreciate that for sure. Most of the time when someone's salty about being towed, there's a lot of needless filler between the start of the conversation and the big F*CK YOU at the end.
Kinda like how you can't watch a disaster movie without having to suffer 30 minutes of C-list character actors trying to make me empathize with their character's impending demise when all I really want to see is the CGI asteroid leveling the Chicago Loop. Which I migjht add, I could get at home, for free, on YouTube, in between DMCA takedown notices, so why would I ever pay for a ticket in the first place?
Thanks for the bootleg version of our argument, Pal, went a lot quicker.
Public Service Announcement
Here's something that you wouldn't think you'd HAVE to warn anyone about, but it turns out, you do.
Joining the tail-end of the football team's homecomming parade, unannounced, in your personal vehicle, without a float, is sure to get you arrested for a DUI and have said car impounded until your mortified husband comes in to get it.
Thank you.
Once More, With Less Pretentiousness
TOWING MANAGER - Friendly Neighborhood Towing, Manager speaking, how can I help you?
MORON - I think you towed my car
TOWING MANAGER - Okay, what kind and where?
MORON - A Honda, from somewhere around downtown
TOWING MANAGER - Well, I have more than one Honda, and everything I've got came from downtown, what color was it
MORON - Velvet
TOWING MANAGER - Nope, don't have it *slam*
ME - You didn't even look
TOWING MANAGER - I'm not going to either, if they're going to be that way about it, they can waste the afternoon on their own time, not mine.
ME - Good point
FWIW: Whatever color velvet it was, we didn't have it, someone else must've towed them.
New Ways Found to Fail at Life
Sadly, my days of critiquing bad attempts at faking Global Domination Reality permits may be coming to a close, they've radically revised their permits for this semester. What were once green and big enough to wear as a necktie are now orange and about 5'' long by 3'' tall. This means that every single green that may still be out there is no good to try and build a fake from, and the new ones are so tiny that once the expiration dates have been filled in by the secretary in the only free space in the one corner, there simply is no room to do anything. Attempting to write new dates or alter the existing ones will be as obvious as trying to tamper microfiche (God, I'm old, Google that if you're 25 or younger, kids) with a felt-tip marker, it ain't gonna work. (Not that one person didn't try it last Friday and got his car ganked, but he was the first. Keep in mind this is four football games into the semester, I used to get four fakes EACH football game)
Oh, and that's just the temporary passes. The REAL "permanent" passes that last all semester are now window stickers, they stick to the glass now, so no more of this "Well I gave the permit to a friend" or "it must've fallen off the mirror, into the ashtray, and then incinerated itself when you towed me!" BS. You stick it on the rear window glass and you've got no way out.
Ah, I'll miss handing out those "F see me at impound" grades on our art projects, so much of the fun times, now gone by the wayside, never to come again, like a Cleveland Browns starting quarterback.
Never fear though, as something is made idiot proof, nature creates a better idiot. Two people have managed to cock it all up by taking those window stickers and not sticking them to the windows, but, taping them, to the OUTSIDE of the car, one with scotch tape, the other packing tape.
Yeah, that's right, instead of sticking them to the inside of the glass, as you'd assume would be the logical thing to do with a self-sticking STICKER, they instead loosely taped them to the outside, in the ELEMENTS.
To no one's shock but their own, they lasted about 48 hours before they either fell off or were stolen.
And then they got towed.
And they whined like a bunch of babies about how unfair it was.....
Actually, what's unfair is your vote will count just as much as mine this November, THAT'S what's unfair around here, SKippy-poo.
The House That no One Leaves (Because they Can't Get There in the First Place).
Some things in life can't be explained, Bigfoot, UFOs, UFOlogists, The Bermuda Triangle, Whatever happened to Cuba Gooding Jr......
Well, I humbly add to the list, this house of cognitive horror, 128 Millard Fillmore Ave.
It's a rental property, owned by Global Domination Reality. Used to be a house, now it's an apartment, and in the conversion process the original one-car driveway was abandoned and the back lot was paved over to make a big enough lot for the tenants.
Live here? Need to park here? You turn left off of Millard Fillmore, into the alley that separates 128 from 130, turn left again, and pull into the backyard, right behind the house you live at. Simple, no?
So why, in the last week have THREE people fallen past that window to their certain dea.... no, wait, that's not it...
Why have THREE people all done the following: turned left into the alley, and then turned right and parked behind the WRONG HOUSE, 130 Millard Fillmore? Which is NOT a GDR property, it's owned by a crusty old Greek landlord we tow for when people, well, park on his property, as it's the only one he has. (Meaning he currently has more liquidity than the actual Greek government, scary thought)
Why have they done this?!
Well, they told us why. The first two were adamant, adamant indeed that since the back of 128 is paved, and the back of 130 is paved, and the alley between them was paved, then "it's all the same".
Uh, no, Sweet Celestia, NO! It's NOT all the same, there's a STREET (okay alley) in between, that usually denotes the end of one property and the start of another, I mean, I don't have to cross a road to get from my bedroom to the bathroom in the morning, I don't have to cross train tracks to get from fridge to table in the kitchen, these rather large pieces of infrastructure tend to denote SEPARATION between properties, not continuity!
Nope, that wasn't cutting it, they declared they were going to call Global Domination Reality and THEY would tell us we were in the wrong.
They called.
GDR didn't tell them we were in the wrong.
They were quite upset, and tried sticking the bill WITH GDR because "They never told us we couldn't park over there"
That didn't work either. Why should it have? GDR didn't tell you to embarrass your parents, make me question the competency of your primary education institution and waste my time either, and you did all that anyway too!
So the duo left poorer and angrier than they had been this morning.
Oh, that third guy I mentioned? After the first two people hosed it up, GDR printed up flyers and stuck them under the wipers of all the other cars in their lot explaining that everyone living at 128 HAD to say on THEIR side of the alley, which was circled on a helpful ariel Google map of the block, in case you weren't sure.
Yep, the third guy pulled into 130 anyway, and got towed, with the flyer showing him exactly WHERE to park, CIRCLED no less, lying on the dash, ignored.
And then the landlord at 500 Potato street called, he's about three BLOCKS from 128 Fillmore, one of their cars ended up in his lot, somehow, with one of those maps on the dash..... a fourth one misses the mark and misses it worstest of all!
Book em Lou, One Count of Attempting to Grow a Brain
The only thing worse than a dumb person is a dumb one who thinks he has a good idea.
Like, let's say you got your car towed for parking at Substandard Taco downtown and then moseying off to class.
Since it's customers only, you got the hook.
You come back to find your car missing and realize what you did wrong, but wait! There's an easy way out! You just reach into the trashcan outside the door, pull out the first receipt you find and march on down to tow in' town and slap that receipt on the counter, demanding we let the car go because obviously we screwed up and towed a customer....
If you're going to do that, here's a tip.
Don't be surprised if the manager decides to quiz you on what you ordered, and is a bit skeptical you can't remember what you had for lunch, why it was only five minutes ago according to the time on this.....
You should also probably try to keep straight in your mind which national fast food chains have contracts with the Coca-Cola corporation vs. Pepsico for their beverages if you want us to actually BELIEVE more than zero of your lies.
Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here.
Aaaand... sleep.
Can't Keep Em Crooked to Keep Em Straight
This kindly little old lady we know runs a kindly little old shop across the street from the kindly little old campus of our kindly old University.
Naturally, this means she often finds people trying to park in her lot who have no intention of shopping there and are looking for free parking close enough to their class that they don't have to get up until 4 minutes before it starts. So we frequently get tows from there, like this girl. What we usually don't get, are ones this scatterbrained when it comes to "quick, make an excuse" time.
-What the hell did I get towed for?
-Where you parked is a private lot, it's for customers of the business only
-But I had to be at my job!
-Doesn't matter, it's customers only, it's signed as such, and the store owner who's run that place for years called you in for the tow.
-Well, you need to do something about the signs down there, because it's not clear you can't park there and go to class!
-Class? Thought you said you were at work?
-Uh.... uh..... uh......
I've heard of giving someone just enough rope to hang themselves, but this person literally choked to death on ambient dust while in line at the rope-cutting counter.
The Tow Files: BANNED IN BOSTON!
Another day, another apoplectic at the front counter raging that he has to pay to get his car back for the crime of not caring enough about where he left it.
The whole crux of this guys argument was that we were a bunch of scammers because what we're doing would be ILLEGAL in PITTSBURGH!
How? Because of the fees? The signage? The time of day? He didn't elaborate, he just wanted us to know, the way it works in this town would be AGAINST THE LAW in Pittsburgh.
Do Tell.
Also, tell me, outside that window over there.
Yinz see any chip chop ham sammiches?
Yinz see any gum bands?
Yinz see any bus headed for "Downtahn" ?
Yinz see the Pirates painfully stumbling towards another losing season?
No?
Well, then I guess this isn't PIttsburg, your argument is invalid.
The Sh*ttiest SC This Week
Had an odd tow. Not in the sense that it was an odd car, you can't get more boilerplate on the highway these days than the Nissan Altima. Nope, it was the "from" and "to" parts of the tow that were nonstandard.
Pickup was at a rental car agency at the Airport.
Drop Off was at Costly Hand Auto Detailers.
Why? I was under the impression that the rental car company had it's own maintenance/cleaning facility out there, I've dropped off there many a time.
Well, they do, and therein lies the issue. NONE of the workers at the facility are willing to touch this car.
What could be the reason for such a mutiny?
Because the guy who rented it last let his dog (or possibly dogs) live in it, and apparently only returned it when the smell of canine feces/urine became too much for him to see the road through the tears in his eyes.
Naturally, nobody else is going to want to get into this rolling manure spreader. Until/unless it's salvageable by an industrial-grade cleansing, it's useless as a rental car.
And it may not be, this is the SECOND time it's been towed over to the detailer, the first visit only reduced the unbelievable stench to a more believable level, it didn't eradicate it enough to loan out the car again to anyone who wasn't a suspected Neo-Nazi.
Manager at the rental place said if this doesn't work, they'll have to write the vehicle off as a loss, send it to a salvage yard, and get a new one.
And here's the kicker, this is the THIRD car said renter has ruined by letting his dogs live in it.
Why do they keep renting to him? Per the manager "I want to refuse to give this guy another car, but regional says we can't risk losing a customer. So we're running up the damage bill in the hope we can convince them to get rid of him"
Way to go Corporate America, you're the shining beacon of logic and intelligence in the world once again. While some of the denizens of this planet can't get enough to eat and only dream of maybe one day owning a car, you have wasted THREE perfectly good ones and a tone of ancillary resources on a guy who can't be arsed to watch where his pets take a dump..... good one.
Seein' Red and Green and Purple and, Everything Short of Burnt Sienna
I would like to stop and take a moment here to extend a "thank you" to the US Department of the Treasury, which over the years has introduced more color to the dollar. For those who don't often get to handle actual real US Currency, like our friendly Aussies, Brits and any liberal arts majors, they've been slowly easing everyone in to using "colored" money over the years by adding a little bit of peach-orange or pale blue to what have always been traditionally green/black notes.
The unintended side effect of this is when someone tries to plead poverty for a tow by opening their billfold and showing the meager contents, well, the old "Put the $1 bill on top of the bigger ones" trick no longer works.
As the guy Spitzilla had hooked up for trying to sneak into the lot of Substandard Taco and leave without patronizing learned.
He tried to argue he only had $4 on him and couldn't possibly pay the $75 drop fee, holding up the wallet for a tug of the ol' heartstrings.
Spiz looked in it and said "There's nothing but purple behind that one, you have more than enough and I'll be happy to make change"
The guy then threatened to get in the car and stay there until Spitz either let him go or was old enough to collect social security.
Spitz told him if he did that he'd be seeing red and blue.... as in red and blue strobe lights, on the roof of the car, that would haul him off to jail, but "go ahead, I haven't seen that in a while, I love it when the cops drag people out of their cars"
The guy paid
He wasn't happy
We really didn't care.
Escalating Quickly
Guy - "I'm here to pick up my car, why'd I get towed? I have a permit"
Me - "Yeah, that permit expired in August"
Guy - "Go F*CK yourself!"
Well, that certainly got right to the point. I can appreciate that for sure. Most of the time when someone's salty about being towed, there's a lot of needless filler between the start of the conversation and the big F*CK YOU at the end.
Kinda like how you can't watch a disaster movie without having to suffer 30 minutes of C-list character actors trying to make me empathize with their character's impending demise when all I really want to see is the CGI asteroid leveling the Chicago Loop. Which I migjht add, I could get at home, for free, on YouTube, in between DMCA takedown notices, so why would I ever pay for a ticket in the first place?
Thanks for the bootleg version of our argument, Pal, went a lot quicker.
Public Service Announcement
Here's something that you wouldn't think you'd HAVE to warn anyone about, but it turns out, you do.
Joining the tail-end of the football team's homecomming parade, unannounced, in your personal vehicle, without a float, is sure to get you arrested for a DUI and have said car impounded until your mortified husband comes in to get it.
Thank you.
Once More, With Less Pretentiousness
TOWING MANAGER - Friendly Neighborhood Towing, Manager speaking, how can I help you?
MORON - I think you towed my car
TOWING MANAGER - Okay, what kind and where?
MORON - A Honda, from somewhere around downtown
TOWING MANAGER - Well, I have more than one Honda, and everything I've got came from downtown, what color was it
MORON - Velvet
TOWING MANAGER - Nope, don't have it *slam*
ME - You didn't even look
TOWING MANAGER - I'm not going to either, if they're going to be that way about it, they can waste the afternoon on their own time, not mine.
ME - Good point
FWIW: Whatever color velvet it was, we didn't have it, someone else must've towed them.
New Ways Found to Fail at Life
Sadly, my days of critiquing bad attempts at faking Global Domination Reality permits may be coming to a close, they've radically revised their permits for this semester. What were once green and big enough to wear as a necktie are now orange and about 5'' long by 3'' tall. This means that every single green that may still be out there is no good to try and build a fake from, and the new ones are so tiny that once the expiration dates have been filled in by the secretary in the only free space in the one corner, there simply is no room to do anything. Attempting to write new dates or alter the existing ones will be as obvious as trying to tamper microfiche (God, I'm old, Google that if you're 25 or younger, kids) with a felt-tip marker, it ain't gonna work. (Not that one person didn't try it last Friday and got his car ganked, but he was the first. Keep in mind this is four football games into the semester, I used to get four fakes EACH football game)
Oh, and that's just the temporary passes. The REAL "permanent" passes that last all semester are now window stickers, they stick to the glass now, so no more of this "Well I gave the permit to a friend" or "it must've fallen off the mirror, into the ashtray, and then incinerated itself when you towed me!" BS. You stick it on the rear window glass and you've got no way out.
Ah, I'll miss handing out those "F see me at impound" grades on our art projects, so much of the fun times, now gone by the wayside, never to come again, like a Cleveland Browns starting quarterback.
Never fear though, as something is made idiot proof, nature creates a better idiot. Two people have managed to cock it all up by taking those window stickers and not sticking them to the windows, but, taping them, to the OUTSIDE of the car, one with scotch tape, the other packing tape.
Yeah, that's right, instead of sticking them to the inside of the glass, as you'd assume would be the logical thing to do with a self-sticking STICKER, they instead loosely taped them to the outside, in the ELEMENTS.
To no one's shock but their own, they lasted about 48 hours before they either fell off or were stolen.
And then they got towed.
And they whined like a bunch of babies about how unfair it was.....
Actually, what's unfair is your vote will count just as much as mine this November, THAT'S what's unfair around here, SKippy-poo.
The House That no One Leaves (Because they Can't Get There in the First Place).
Some things in life can't be explained, Bigfoot, UFOs, UFOlogists, The Bermuda Triangle, Whatever happened to Cuba Gooding Jr......
Well, I humbly add to the list, this house of cognitive horror, 128 Millard Fillmore Ave.
It's a rental property, owned by Global Domination Reality. Used to be a house, now it's an apartment, and in the conversion process the original one-car driveway was abandoned and the back lot was paved over to make a big enough lot for the tenants.
Live here? Need to park here? You turn left off of Millard Fillmore, into the alley that separates 128 from 130, turn left again, and pull into the backyard, right behind the house you live at. Simple, no?
So why, in the last week have THREE people fallen past that window to their certain dea.... no, wait, that's not it...
Why have THREE people all done the following: turned left into the alley, and then turned right and parked behind the WRONG HOUSE, 130 Millard Fillmore? Which is NOT a GDR property, it's owned by a crusty old Greek landlord we tow for when people, well, park on his property, as it's the only one he has. (Meaning he currently has more liquidity than the actual Greek government, scary thought)
Why have they done this?!
Well, they told us why. The first two were adamant, adamant indeed that since the back of 128 is paved, and the back of 130 is paved, and the alley between them was paved, then "it's all the same".
Uh, no, Sweet Celestia, NO! It's NOT all the same, there's a STREET (okay alley) in between, that usually denotes the end of one property and the start of another, I mean, I don't have to cross a road to get from my bedroom to the bathroom in the morning, I don't have to cross train tracks to get from fridge to table in the kitchen, these rather large pieces of infrastructure tend to denote SEPARATION between properties, not continuity!
Nope, that wasn't cutting it, they declared they were going to call Global Domination Reality and THEY would tell us we were in the wrong.
They called.
GDR didn't tell them we were in the wrong.
They were quite upset, and tried sticking the bill WITH GDR because "They never told us we couldn't park over there"
That didn't work either. Why should it have? GDR didn't tell you to embarrass your parents, make me question the competency of your primary education institution and waste my time either, and you did all that anyway too!
So the duo left poorer and angrier than they had been this morning.
Oh, that third guy I mentioned? After the first two people hosed it up, GDR printed up flyers and stuck them under the wipers of all the other cars in their lot explaining that everyone living at 128 HAD to say on THEIR side of the alley, which was circled on a helpful ariel Google map of the block, in case you weren't sure.
Yep, the third guy pulled into 130 anyway, and got towed, with the flyer showing him exactly WHERE to park, CIRCLED no less, lying on the dash, ignored.
And then the landlord at 500 Potato street called, he's about three BLOCKS from 128 Fillmore, one of their cars ended up in his lot, somehow, with one of those maps on the dash..... a fourth one misses the mark and misses it worstest of all!
Book em Lou, One Count of Attempting to Grow a Brain
The only thing worse than a dumb person is a dumb one who thinks he has a good idea.
Like, let's say you got your car towed for parking at Substandard Taco downtown and then moseying off to class.
Since it's customers only, you got the hook.
You come back to find your car missing and realize what you did wrong, but wait! There's an easy way out! You just reach into the trashcan outside the door, pull out the first receipt you find and march on down to tow in' town and slap that receipt on the counter, demanding we let the car go because obviously we screwed up and towed a customer....
If you're going to do that, here's a tip.
Don't be surprised if the manager decides to quiz you on what you ordered, and is a bit skeptical you can't remember what you had for lunch, why it was only five minutes ago according to the time on this.....
You should also probably try to keep straight in your mind which national fast food chains have contracts with the Coca-Cola corporation vs. Pepsico for their beverages if you want us to actually BELIEVE more than zero of your lies.
Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here.
Aaaand... sleep.
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