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End of football season that is, and on the one hand, I'll be happy to get some sleep, on the other, I'll sure miss stuff like this. At least until next year.
Flakes with Fakes
Perhaps our intrepid student in this story was taking an economics class as an elective and decided to put that knowledge to good use.
"Why?" she may have wondered, "Why do I have to buy three temp permits so my friends can visit me this weekend? I can just buy one, and then use it to forge two others, for only 1/3 the price!"
Well, the reason that doesn't work is when I towed those two friends of yours in for their use of said fake permits, the costs and fees between them were $290 for tows/tickets, and the incalculable cost of shame, assuming they had any, which probably put your projected savings into the red, sad to say.
You were a bit dumbstruck how you got caught as you thought the fakes "were pretty good"
And they were.
Except for the obvious scissor marks
And the fact you didn't use card stock, so they were too thin, too wrinkly.
And, because you used white paper and not colored card stock, they were only the right shade of green on the front, the back was still, well, white.
And the fact that they were identical between them, even things that can never truly be congruent no matter how hard one may try, like the secretary's handwriting and the strokes of the felt tip pen that made them, were the EXACT SAME on both, which can only be accomplished by mechanical-aided mass production
And the fact mechanical-aided mass production isn't foolproof either. Your printer hiccuped and for some reason bumped everything on one of the fakes about 3 or 4 pixels left, halfway though, right in the MIDDLE of that row of letters. The resulting fault line was fairly obvious and would have been caught had you done some post-printing QC.
And the fact you parked those cars within 10 feet of each other, one suspicious permit leads to me looking for more in the same vicinity...
But yeah, aside from all of THAT, they were GOOD!
Good for a laugh
As they went in the trash
Better luck next time
The Fake Returns, With a Vengeance
Speaking of finding on suspicious permit, that complex where we had 4 fakes last week was at it again.
Seems one of them didn't learn his lesson.
Well, he learned the WRONG lesson.
What being charged $130 to get his car back should have taught him was "Don't forge sh*t" instead, the REAL Aesop was apparently "Don't forge sh*t and do a sh*tty job" because this time, it was a truly VALIANT effort.
He had the right color, right shape, right size, right dates, even had the backside right, where there SHOULD be a "remove before driving" warning that 99% of caught fakes forget to include. But he actually remembered to flip it over and run it though the printer the second time to get that on there.
Alas, he forgot one tiny little thing.
The serial number on the bottom, that should be unique to just one permit.
It wasn't.
Permit 00212 was already accounted for in that lot, two cars down from the suspected fake.
You may be ramping up your forging skillz (tm) but, In turn, I'm ramping up my diligence when I have a known "problem lot" that's ripe for these kind of shenanigans, so what might have passed by unnoticed at DEFCON 5 is sure as heck going to blip the radar when were at DEFCON 1 and primed to fire.
At this rate though, another weekend of trying and you'll probably finally be able to forge one I can't detect, but by that point, the semester will be over, the permits will change, and all that effort put into getting one past Da Man (tm) will have been for naught, as you've already forked over $390 worth of tows and whatever your production overhead was in the desire to not pay him, well, a LOT LESS than that for a real permit...
Oh well, who am I to judge you? Knock yourself out and go for the three-peat. I'll be over here in the meantime, sleeping on this huge pile of ill-gotten money, some of which is yours, I believe.
That Relationship is Over
The young heroine of this next story found herself in quite the pickle.
Seems that she returned to her SUV, only to find Spitzilla had it halfway to towsville.
She asks why this is so. He informs her that she has 4 unpaid week-old parking tickets that are delinquent now, and one on her windshield that's just a baby, being only about 10 minutes old, the whole ticket family being the result of her persistent insistence of parking at parking meters and not paying them. Once you've got that many, the ticket folks just decide to stop wasting paper on you, and give you the cold steel hook instead.
So, she owes a $75 drop, a $15 ticket, and 4 $25 tickets before her car can be consider to have repaid it's debt to society.
She protests, she has 10 days to pay tickets before they count against her.
Spiz flips over the envelope of the ticket on the car and points out it says, right on the back,
So much for THAT theory.
This upsets the young woman's boyfriend, who has caught up to the party. And upon learning something bad is happening to his fair lady, he does the only appropriate thing for his age/gender demographic.
He goes full "bro"
You NEVER go full "bro"
I wasn't there, so this was all through Spitz' memory, and, according to him, Bro-friend looked to have already had a few to start the day, so a lot of it was incoherent.
According to Spitz, bro attempted to "accidentally" bump into him and start a fight. He then tried to fight with everyone walking by on the sidewalk, some of whom had the nerve to point out that his girlfriend was getting towed, or maybe just looked at the developing trainwreck a little too long. No takers there either. Convinced it was because they just didn't know what a bad ass Bro was, he loudly declared he "wasn't scared" to fight, because he'd been kicked out of a bar the night before, for fighting... still no takers.
His now-mortified girlfriend, who's not happy about the tow, but is nonetheless being compliant, tells him to calm down, he's embarrassing her.
Brofriend still is itching for a fight.
She tells him to just go inside the Starbucks adjacent to where she's parked and get himself a coffee or something, she'll be done paying by the time he gets back. Spitz runs her credit card, gets her a receipt, unhooks the car and pulls clear.
She gets in and takes off.
Spitz noticed what you all probably just did, she DIDN'T wait for brofriend after all, and I don't think it was an accident...... too bad Spitz had to go help a person who'd locked themselves out of their car, I so wanted to know what Bro's face looked like when he came back...
That relationship is probably a goner.
Maybe it all Makes Sense.. If Yer High.
I don't know what's worse about this particular concrete palace of an apartment we tow from. Is it the fact that the first 4 floors are an impenetrable catacomb masquerading as a parking garage? With 90 degree turns, lack of lighting, low overheads, and the occasional minotaur encounter? Or maybe it's the exterior, the poster child for everything that was wrong with the brutalist school of architecture, hideous even BEFORE it got slathered in a 3-color combo (red-orange/brown/tan) that I was certain had been ruled illegal on mental health grounds since the 1980 ruling in Rodgers v. Glidden Paint Co. was upheld?
The office secretary is MOST CERTAINLY a front runner on the gripe list, due to her habit of double-leasing parking spaces, as in, she'll rent space #44, to multiple people, up to THREE, and the first day of classes, we'll end up towing two people who technically paid for the space. This semester alone we've had six or so give-backs for this very reason.
YOU HAVE A FILE! HOW CAN YOU NOT NOTICE THERE'S ALREADY A NAME IN THERE?!!. OR TWO?! OR THREE?!!!
And worst of all, when she calls up to tell us we've once again just wasted 20 minutes and a gallon of diesel because that car we just towed in? We have to let them go cuz it was her bad, he he he, sorry..... ugh... That laugh of hers doesn't help either. Makes it pretty clear she thinks the chaos she sews is just HILARIOUS.
Yeah, keep laughing there, Joeleine, one of these days, my fantasy about opening a Christmas gift and finding it's an article of clothing that's been partially if not WHOLLY woven from YOUR LARYNX is bound to come true!!!!
Whew, now that that infuriating but necessary backstory is out of the way, on to the story itself.
Because the filing system there is a mess, it took them four weeks to figure out that the one car that kept parking in space 38 didn't belong there, because it wasn't leased. We towed it in, and it sat for 3 days, accruing storage before the owner found it missing.
He came in with his buddy, and, had a bad case of verbal diarrhea in the front office... instead of actually paying, he wanted to argue, and argue and argue....
For FORTY minutes.
What were they arguing about?
- They LIVE there, so we can't tow them (You may LIVE there, but unless you opt for the parking space when you rent, and the extra $600 per semester that entails, you're SOL)
- Since they'd gotten away with it for 4 weeks, the apartment had their chance to catch them, and failed, so they can't just suddenly... catch them... or something.... yeah, the one time you sped and didn't get caught doesn't grant you immunity from ever being caught in the future.
- Our towing signs don't meet legal requirements, the "legal requirements" he cited don't exist in this state, maybe his home state, but not here.
- We aren't a legal towing business because our business signs out front don't have our posted hours on them, day by day, (the "24 hours" isn't good enough) Again, this may be the case back where he's from, but not here
- Their car is the ONLY form of transportation they have, therefore, we cannot "withhold personal means of transportation" from them (watch us
)
- We can't charge storage (the fact we did kinda shoots that down)
- Since THEY didn't ask for a tow, THEY don't have to pay! It's the apartment's bill! (Wow, there's flawed logic, bad logic, and then there's that... MOON logic!)
So after about a half an hour of this happy horsecrap, we decide it's ultimatum time, SURRENDER: Or be blown into 200,000 micro cells! Oops, that one was intended for Marvin Martian, ahem, I meant to say: Pay or hit the bricks.
Well, gee, now we get to the REAL reason for all the arguing, they can't pay. They're just Poor College Kidz (tm) and they have no money.
Well, reality is a harsh mistress, ain't she?
No, we apparently don't understand, they're poor, they can't PAY to get the car back, so, uh... something... and they can just have it, right?
Nope
Now they're really getting desperate, desperate enough that they offered us weed.
Yeah, you read that right, they said that if we want to get paid, we're going to have to take marijuana in a barter... uh.... lemme think about that for a few seconds while I pick my brain up off the floor by it's tail as it's trying to run away from that stupidity.... ahh, there we go.
Uh, NO, you cannot pay us with illegal drugs, hell, you can't pay us WITH legal drugs, the only payment we take is cash, credit or debit. If you're that low on funds go SELL the weed and see if that nets you enough cash to pay us.
Now for the finale, they threaten to call the cops on us.
Wha, wait... I ..... for what?
Apparently it's illegal to not give a car back if the owner can't/won't pay, I dunno, I'm still a bit shocked that these two WANT to call the cops AFTER having offered us WEED.
It's your funeral dudes.
So the cops are called.
The pair intercept the officer in the parking lot before he can even come inside and spend the next 10 minutes or so chatting him up while we debate wether or not to tell the cops they probably have weed on them. Oh, it's decision time, here comes Ossafer Friendly now! So, what's up?
"These two guys keep citing laws that don't exist" he says "Told them they can either pay, or take you to civil court, the usual"
Hmmm... oh what the heck, we'll be extra evil today
"You know, they tried to pay us in weed"
"Really?"
"Yep, and then they called you"
Cop shakes his head and goes back outside, after another 5 or so minutes of interlude, he returns with some good news, they'll pay, as soon as the one kid's mom transfers some cash into his account. Seems when given the option of either paying or having their pockets emptied out, they chose to make arrangements to pay. Despite their very poor legal knowledge, they knew at least ONE very valid law that was about to be enforced on them if they continued to be nuisances.
"Gets better" says the cop, "I ran their names through the computer, the one guy's license has been suspended, the other one has a rap sheet about a mile long, disorderly conduct, possession, it was quite a read. Anyway, make sure the one with the bad license isn't the one who drives it off, okay?"
Sure
Eventually the money from Mommykins arrives and the two are allowed to leave.
The kicker, wasn't even their car. It was MOM's.
It must be interesting going through life like that... not that I'd WANT to, but, is there a newsletter or email list of yours I could subscribe to? I get the feeling hilarity like this happens everywhere you two go.
Flakes with Fakes
Perhaps our intrepid student in this story was taking an economics class as an elective and decided to put that knowledge to good use.
"Why?" she may have wondered, "Why do I have to buy three temp permits so my friends can visit me this weekend? I can just buy one, and then use it to forge two others, for only 1/3 the price!"
Well, the reason that doesn't work is when I towed those two friends of yours in for their use of said fake permits, the costs and fees between them were $290 for tows/tickets, and the incalculable cost of shame, assuming they had any, which probably put your projected savings into the red, sad to say.
You were a bit dumbstruck how you got caught as you thought the fakes "were pretty good"
And they were.
Except for the obvious scissor marks
And the fact you didn't use card stock, so they were too thin, too wrinkly.
And, because you used white paper and not colored card stock, they were only the right shade of green on the front, the back was still, well, white.
And the fact that they were identical between them, even things that can never truly be congruent no matter how hard one may try, like the secretary's handwriting and the strokes of the felt tip pen that made them, were the EXACT SAME on both, which can only be accomplished by mechanical-aided mass production
And the fact mechanical-aided mass production isn't foolproof either. Your printer hiccuped and for some reason bumped everything on one of the fakes about 3 or 4 pixels left, halfway though, right in the MIDDLE of that row of letters. The resulting fault line was fairly obvious and would have been caught had you done some post-printing QC.
And the fact you parked those cars within 10 feet of each other, one suspicious permit leads to me looking for more in the same vicinity...
But yeah, aside from all of THAT, they were GOOD!
Good for a laugh
As they went in the trash
Better luck next time
The Fake Returns, With a Vengeance
Speaking of finding on suspicious permit, that complex where we had 4 fakes last week was at it again.
Seems one of them didn't learn his lesson.
Well, he learned the WRONG lesson.
What being charged $130 to get his car back should have taught him was "Don't forge sh*t" instead, the REAL Aesop was apparently "Don't forge sh*t and do a sh*tty job" because this time, it was a truly VALIANT effort.
He had the right color, right shape, right size, right dates, even had the backside right, where there SHOULD be a "remove before driving" warning that 99% of caught fakes forget to include. But he actually remembered to flip it over and run it though the printer the second time to get that on there.
Alas, he forgot one tiny little thing.
The serial number on the bottom, that should be unique to just one permit.
It wasn't.
Permit 00212 was already accounted for in that lot, two cars down from the suspected fake.
You may be ramping up your forging skillz (tm) but, In turn, I'm ramping up my diligence when I have a known "problem lot" that's ripe for these kind of shenanigans, so what might have passed by unnoticed at DEFCON 5 is sure as heck going to blip the radar when were at DEFCON 1 and primed to fire.
At this rate though, another weekend of trying and you'll probably finally be able to forge one I can't detect, but by that point, the semester will be over, the permits will change, and all that effort put into getting one past Da Man (tm) will have been for naught, as you've already forked over $390 worth of tows and whatever your production overhead was in the desire to not pay him, well, a LOT LESS than that for a real permit...
Oh well, who am I to judge you? Knock yourself out and go for the three-peat. I'll be over here in the meantime, sleeping on this huge pile of ill-gotten money, some of which is yours, I believe.
That Relationship is Over
The young heroine of this next story found herself in quite the pickle.
Seems that she returned to her SUV, only to find Spitzilla had it halfway to towsville.
She asks why this is so. He informs her that she has 4 unpaid week-old parking tickets that are delinquent now, and one on her windshield that's just a baby, being only about 10 minutes old, the whole ticket family being the result of her persistent insistence of parking at parking meters and not paying them. Once you've got that many, the ticket folks just decide to stop wasting paper on you, and give you the cold steel hook instead.
So, she owes a $75 drop, a $15 ticket, and 4 $25 tickets before her car can be consider to have repaid it's debt to society.
She protests, she has 10 days to pay tickets before they count against her.
Spiz flips over the envelope of the ticket on the car and points out it says, right on the back,
"Tickets not paid in 48 hours are considered delinquent, all unpaid tickets will be prosecuted to fullest extent of law"
So much for THAT theory.
This upsets the young woman's boyfriend, who has caught up to the party. And upon learning something bad is happening to his fair lady, he does the only appropriate thing for his age/gender demographic.
He goes full "bro"
You NEVER go full "bro"
I wasn't there, so this was all through Spitz' memory, and, according to him, Bro-friend looked to have already had a few to start the day, so a lot of it was incoherent.
According to Spitz, bro attempted to "accidentally" bump into him and start a fight. He then tried to fight with everyone walking by on the sidewalk, some of whom had the nerve to point out that his girlfriend was getting towed, or maybe just looked at the developing trainwreck a little too long. No takers there either. Convinced it was because they just didn't know what a bad ass Bro was, he loudly declared he "wasn't scared" to fight, because he'd been kicked out of a bar the night before, for fighting... still no takers.
His now-mortified girlfriend, who's not happy about the tow, but is nonetheless being compliant, tells him to calm down, he's embarrassing her.
Brofriend still is itching for a fight.
She tells him to just go inside the Starbucks adjacent to where she's parked and get himself a coffee or something, she'll be done paying by the time he gets back. Spitz runs her credit card, gets her a receipt, unhooks the car and pulls clear.
She gets in and takes off.
Spitz noticed what you all probably just did, she DIDN'T wait for brofriend after all, and I don't think it was an accident...... too bad Spitz had to go help a person who'd locked themselves out of their car, I so wanted to know what Bro's face looked like when he came back...
That relationship is probably a goner.
Maybe it all Makes Sense.. If Yer High.
I don't know what's worse about this particular concrete palace of an apartment we tow from. Is it the fact that the first 4 floors are an impenetrable catacomb masquerading as a parking garage? With 90 degree turns, lack of lighting, low overheads, and the occasional minotaur encounter? Or maybe it's the exterior, the poster child for everything that was wrong with the brutalist school of architecture, hideous even BEFORE it got slathered in a 3-color combo (red-orange/brown/tan) that I was certain had been ruled illegal on mental health grounds since the 1980 ruling in Rodgers v. Glidden Paint Co. was upheld?
The office secretary is MOST CERTAINLY a front runner on the gripe list, due to her habit of double-leasing parking spaces, as in, she'll rent space #44, to multiple people, up to THREE, and the first day of classes, we'll end up towing two people who technically paid for the space. This semester alone we've had six or so give-backs for this very reason.
YOU HAVE A FILE! HOW CAN YOU NOT NOTICE THERE'S ALREADY A NAME IN THERE?!!. OR TWO?! OR THREE?!!!
And worst of all, when she calls up to tell us we've once again just wasted 20 minutes and a gallon of diesel because that car we just towed in? We have to let them go cuz it was her bad, he he he, sorry..... ugh... That laugh of hers doesn't help either. Makes it pretty clear she thinks the chaos she sews is just HILARIOUS.
Yeah, keep laughing there, Joeleine, one of these days, my fantasy about opening a Christmas gift and finding it's an article of clothing that's been partially if not WHOLLY woven from YOUR LARYNX is bound to come true!!!!
Whew, now that that infuriating but necessary backstory is out of the way, on to the story itself.
Because the filing system there is a mess, it took them four weeks to figure out that the one car that kept parking in space 38 didn't belong there, because it wasn't leased. We towed it in, and it sat for 3 days, accruing storage before the owner found it missing.
He came in with his buddy, and, had a bad case of verbal diarrhea in the front office... instead of actually paying, he wanted to argue, and argue and argue....
For FORTY minutes.
What were they arguing about?
- They LIVE there, so we can't tow them (You may LIVE there, but unless you opt for the parking space when you rent, and the extra $600 per semester that entails, you're SOL)
- Since they'd gotten away with it for 4 weeks, the apartment had their chance to catch them, and failed, so they can't just suddenly... catch them... or something.... yeah, the one time you sped and didn't get caught doesn't grant you immunity from ever being caught in the future.
- Our towing signs don't meet legal requirements, the "legal requirements" he cited don't exist in this state, maybe his home state, but not here.
- We aren't a legal towing business because our business signs out front don't have our posted hours on them, day by day, (the "24 hours" isn't good enough) Again, this may be the case back where he's from, but not here
- Their car is the ONLY form of transportation they have, therefore, we cannot "withhold personal means of transportation" from them (watch us
)- We can't charge storage (the fact we did kinda shoots that down)
- Since THEY didn't ask for a tow, THEY don't have to pay! It's the apartment's bill! (Wow, there's flawed logic, bad logic, and then there's that... MOON logic!)
So after about a half an hour of this happy horsecrap, we decide it's ultimatum time, SURRENDER: Or be blown into 200,000 micro cells! Oops, that one was intended for Marvin Martian, ahem, I meant to say: Pay or hit the bricks.
Well, gee, now we get to the REAL reason for all the arguing, they can't pay. They're just Poor College Kidz (tm) and they have no money.
Well, reality is a harsh mistress, ain't she?
No, we apparently don't understand, they're poor, they can't PAY to get the car back, so, uh... something... and they can just have it, right?
Nope
Now they're really getting desperate, desperate enough that they offered us weed.
Yeah, you read that right, they said that if we want to get paid, we're going to have to take marijuana in a barter... uh.... lemme think about that for a few seconds while I pick my brain up off the floor by it's tail as it's trying to run away from that stupidity.... ahh, there we go.
Uh, NO, you cannot pay us with illegal drugs, hell, you can't pay us WITH legal drugs, the only payment we take is cash, credit or debit. If you're that low on funds go SELL the weed and see if that nets you enough cash to pay us.
Now for the finale, they threaten to call the cops on us.
Wha, wait... I ..... for what?
Apparently it's illegal to not give a car back if the owner can't/won't pay, I dunno, I'm still a bit shocked that these two WANT to call the cops AFTER having offered us WEED.
It's your funeral dudes.
So the cops are called.
The pair intercept the officer in the parking lot before he can even come inside and spend the next 10 minutes or so chatting him up while we debate wether or not to tell the cops they probably have weed on them. Oh, it's decision time, here comes Ossafer Friendly now! So, what's up?
"These two guys keep citing laws that don't exist" he says "Told them they can either pay, or take you to civil court, the usual"
Hmmm... oh what the heck, we'll be extra evil today
"You know, they tried to pay us in weed"
"Really?"
"Yep, and then they called you"
Cop shakes his head and goes back outside, after another 5 or so minutes of interlude, he returns with some good news, they'll pay, as soon as the one kid's mom transfers some cash into his account. Seems when given the option of either paying or having their pockets emptied out, they chose to make arrangements to pay. Despite their very poor legal knowledge, they knew at least ONE very valid law that was about to be enforced on them if they continued to be nuisances.
"Gets better" says the cop, "I ran their names through the computer, the one guy's license has been suspended, the other one has a rap sheet about a mile long, disorderly conduct, possession, it was quite a read. Anyway, make sure the one with the bad license isn't the one who drives it off, okay?"
Sure
Eventually the money from Mommykins arrives and the two are allowed to leave.
The kicker, wasn't even their car. It was MOM's.
It must be interesting going through life like that... not that I'd WANT to, but, is there a newsletter or email list of yours I could subscribe to? I get the feeling hilarity like this happens everywhere you two go.
So I paid & got the car back. I opened the glove box and it was FILLED with unpaid tickets. 
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