Tweet
THE BARRISTERS MANIFESTO
Sometime a few nights ago, someone dropped what can only be described as an 8 page treatise, complete with title page and bindings, into our mailbox. Seems that the author was a law student who got his BMW towed by us this month and had written us the brief in the hopes we would see the folly of our actions and reimburse him the cost of the tow. See, he’s a very important law student, and he had a VERY important meeting with a lawyer, so important, that when he found all the spaces in the parking lot at the lawyer’s office full, and all the spaces on the street full, well, he had absolutely NO alternative but to park in that short driveway-looking thingy at the apartment next door. How was he supposed to know that short bit of pavement was intended for the garbage truck to access the apartment complex’s dumpster? How was he supposed to know the truck would come by at that hour and be blocked from getting to the dumpster? And why was it possible for the garbagemen to have his car removed? Couldn’t they just drive around the block a few times? He was only going to be there for a couple hours anyway, and that meeting was IMPORTANT! And isn’t it illegal to tow cars without the owner’s permission anyway? Isn’t that like theft? I mean, he’s a law student, and surely he’d know about it, or something, right? It was VERY unprofessional of us not to respect his need to effortlessly meet with other lawyers ya know! Needless to say, we got a good laugh out of it. Last I saw it, the manager was marking it up with a red pen, probably highlighting all the errors, factual, grammatical, and otherwise. Purely for his own amusement, since he already told me he doesn’t intend to call the guy back. I suggested we DO call him back and tell him “Hey, we folded that letter you gave us into a paper airplane and threw it, got a lot farther that way than it did before!” Manager laughed a bit at it, but decided the best place for it was the ol’ circular file….
OBEY THE SIGNS, SIGNS ARE OUR FRIENDS, HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY, HAVE A GREAT DAYCYCLE
The plucky heroine of this next story was looking for parking and blew past the sign for the lot that said “Permit Parking Only” Thus it wasn’t a surprise that we ended up with her car. She complained vehemently that there were no signs, but we told her otherwise and she came in to pick it up. She then left the impound lot, made a right hand turn, and blew past the sign that said “STOP” and into crowded traffic on the main road. Thus it wasn’t a surprise that we ended up with her car, again, now undrivable with the entire left side caved in and a wheel knocked off. She complained vehemently that there was no sign, but the cops AND her passengers both told her otherwise. I always suspected some people can’t see signs, but this may be the final concrete proof.
CAN'T PLEASE NOBODY THESE DAYS
We do more than just towing/impounds, our garage has a fully-operational service department and a fully-operational bodyshop, with all the attendant equipment, shop space and such needed to keep those departments running. This means that the 10 or so parking spaces out front of the building are only to be used for cars that run on their own. Non-running vehicles including wrecks or cars with blown motors, missing wheels, fragged transmissions and seized brakes and such go in the impound lot in back to stay out of the way of traffic. When it’s time for them to be worked on, we tow them around to the front and back them into the bays. Well, the other weekend, I had a guy come by the front door after hours. Seems his car was involved in an accident and is going to be fixed by our bodyshop, and he left something inside of it that he forgot to take when it got towed. What it was, I can’t remember, because when he found out his car was “in the back”, he blew up. He demanded to know why we had put his car in the impound lot? Don’t we know that he’s a VERY IMPORTANT PERSON!!! And if people SEE his car, HIS car, in OUR lot, our IMPOUND LOT, they’ll all assume he’s a deadbeat who won’t pay his bills! We need to get it out of there RIGHT NOW!!! Informing him that there was no room anywhere else for the car seemed to calm him down a bit, as did showing him that his was over in the corner with about a dozen other cars in various states of collision-induced disrepair, so his situation is hardly unique. And he ultimately relented after we pointed out that there’s a FENCE around the lot, one you can’t SEE through, and the lot itself is on the BACKSIDE of the building, off a DEAD END street where nobody really travels unless they’re either picking up a car from us or looking for a place to illegally dump that green, glowing and slightly radioactive stuff the trashmen wouldn’t take. So, he grabbed his stuff and left placated, but he still wanted it known that he wasn’t happy with the current state of affairs. Duly noted, you pompous dillweed….
Related to the above, several months ago we towed a Saturn out of a convenience store parking lot for being abandoned. Pretty obviously abandoned too, it had no license plates when the store manager went out to check on it after it had sat in his lot all day long with no sign of human activity. Well, SOP in cases like this is to write down the VIN, mail the State DMV and have them retrieve the last registered owner’s name. We then send a certified letter to their last known address informing them that we have their wife and if they ever want to see them alive agai…. Oh, wait, that’s a different procedure I’m thinking of, sorry. We tell them we have their CAR, and they now have two options: Pay all outstanding fees (Tow, plus storage at $50 a day, plus paperwork) or mail us the title so we can dispose of it and we’ll settle all fees for $200. 99.9% of the time, we get a title in response. By the time the bureaucratic procedure above runs it’s course, at least 60 to 90 days have elapsed, and the fee owed on the car is usually at least $800-$1000. Considering most abandoned cars aren’t worth more than a chicken dinner with your choice of cole slaw, fries, or a buttermilk biscuit, the “$200-to-punt-it-away-on-4th-down-and-never-see-it-again” option is the one that makes sense. Not to this guy, he suddenly got very attached to his rattletrap Saturn, maybe he had spent the days regretting that nasty breakup they had in the parking lot of that convenience store so many moons ago wishing he could take back all those unkind words he said in anger. Maybe he spent many a night wistfully sitting on his porch, reading his owner’s manual and remembering all those good times he had with it, and knowing, in his heart of hearts that one day, it would come back to him. The day he got that letter in the mail was the happiest day of his life! Must’ve been, because he paid a grand total of $2,000, that’s right, two and FOUR ZEROES, to get the car back. Looney perhaps, but not sucky. The “suck” part came later when he called us to complain. He was upset we had written “ABAND – CONTACT DMV” on the rear window with grease pen, because he couldn’t get it to wash off (uh, it’s a GREASE pen, it’s supposed to not wash off in the rain) and had to scrape the markings off with a razor blade, why did we do such a thing?! It’s very inconvenient! Ugh, some people need better hobbies, pronto!
Sometime a few nights ago, someone dropped what can only be described as an 8 page treatise, complete with title page and bindings, into our mailbox. Seems that the author was a law student who got his BMW towed by us this month and had written us the brief in the hopes we would see the folly of our actions and reimburse him the cost of the tow. See, he’s a very important law student, and he had a VERY important meeting with a lawyer, so important, that when he found all the spaces in the parking lot at the lawyer’s office full, and all the spaces on the street full, well, he had absolutely NO alternative but to park in that short driveway-looking thingy at the apartment next door. How was he supposed to know that short bit of pavement was intended for the garbage truck to access the apartment complex’s dumpster? How was he supposed to know the truck would come by at that hour and be blocked from getting to the dumpster? And why was it possible for the garbagemen to have his car removed? Couldn’t they just drive around the block a few times? He was only going to be there for a couple hours anyway, and that meeting was IMPORTANT! And isn’t it illegal to tow cars without the owner’s permission anyway? Isn’t that like theft? I mean, he’s a law student, and surely he’d know about it, or something, right? It was VERY unprofessional of us not to respect his need to effortlessly meet with other lawyers ya know! Needless to say, we got a good laugh out of it. Last I saw it, the manager was marking it up with a red pen, probably highlighting all the errors, factual, grammatical, and otherwise. Purely for his own amusement, since he already told me he doesn’t intend to call the guy back. I suggested we DO call him back and tell him “Hey, we folded that letter you gave us into a paper airplane and threw it, got a lot farther that way than it did before!” Manager laughed a bit at it, but decided the best place for it was the ol’ circular file….
OBEY THE SIGNS, SIGNS ARE OUR FRIENDS, HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY, HAVE A GREAT DAYCYCLE
The plucky heroine of this next story was looking for parking and blew past the sign for the lot that said “Permit Parking Only” Thus it wasn’t a surprise that we ended up with her car. She complained vehemently that there were no signs, but we told her otherwise and she came in to pick it up. She then left the impound lot, made a right hand turn, and blew past the sign that said “STOP” and into crowded traffic on the main road. Thus it wasn’t a surprise that we ended up with her car, again, now undrivable with the entire left side caved in and a wheel knocked off. She complained vehemently that there was no sign, but the cops AND her passengers both told her otherwise. I always suspected some people can’t see signs, but this may be the final concrete proof.
CAN'T PLEASE NOBODY THESE DAYS
We do more than just towing/impounds, our garage has a fully-operational service department and a fully-operational bodyshop, with all the attendant equipment, shop space and such needed to keep those departments running. This means that the 10 or so parking spaces out front of the building are only to be used for cars that run on their own. Non-running vehicles including wrecks or cars with blown motors, missing wheels, fragged transmissions and seized brakes and such go in the impound lot in back to stay out of the way of traffic. When it’s time for them to be worked on, we tow them around to the front and back them into the bays. Well, the other weekend, I had a guy come by the front door after hours. Seems his car was involved in an accident and is going to be fixed by our bodyshop, and he left something inside of it that he forgot to take when it got towed. What it was, I can’t remember, because when he found out his car was “in the back”, he blew up. He demanded to know why we had put his car in the impound lot? Don’t we know that he’s a VERY IMPORTANT PERSON!!! And if people SEE his car, HIS car, in OUR lot, our IMPOUND LOT, they’ll all assume he’s a deadbeat who won’t pay his bills! We need to get it out of there RIGHT NOW!!! Informing him that there was no room anywhere else for the car seemed to calm him down a bit, as did showing him that his was over in the corner with about a dozen other cars in various states of collision-induced disrepair, so his situation is hardly unique. And he ultimately relented after we pointed out that there’s a FENCE around the lot, one you can’t SEE through, and the lot itself is on the BACKSIDE of the building, off a DEAD END street where nobody really travels unless they’re either picking up a car from us or looking for a place to illegally dump that green, glowing and slightly radioactive stuff the trashmen wouldn’t take. So, he grabbed his stuff and left placated, but he still wanted it known that he wasn’t happy with the current state of affairs. Duly noted, you pompous dillweed….
Related to the above, several months ago we towed a Saturn out of a convenience store parking lot for being abandoned. Pretty obviously abandoned too, it had no license plates when the store manager went out to check on it after it had sat in his lot all day long with no sign of human activity. Well, SOP in cases like this is to write down the VIN, mail the State DMV and have them retrieve the last registered owner’s name. We then send a certified letter to their last known address informing them that we have their wife and if they ever want to see them alive agai…. Oh, wait, that’s a different procedure I’m thinking of, sorry. We tell them we have their CAR, and they now have two options: Pay all outstanding fees (Tow, plus storage at $50 a day, plus paperwork) or mail us the title so we can dispose of it and we’ll settle all fees for $200. 99.9% of the time, we get a title in response. By the time the bureaucratic procedure above runs it’s course, at least 60 to 90 days have elapsed, and the fee owed on the car is usually at least $800-$1000. Considering most abandoned cars aren’t worth more than a chicken dinner with your choice of cole slaw, fries, or a buttermilk biscuit, the “$200-to-punt-it-away-on-4th-down-and-never-see-it-again” option is the one that makes sense. Not to this guy, he suddenly got very attached to his rattletrap Saturn, maybe he had spent the days regretting that nasty breakup they had in the parking lot of that convenience store so many moons ago wishing he could take back all those unkind words he said in anger. Maybe he spent many a night wistfully sitting on his porch, reading his owner’s manual and remembering all those good times he had with it, and knowing, in his heart of hearts that one day, it would come back to him. The day he got that letter in the mail was the happiest day of his life! Must’ve been, because he paid a grand total of $2,000, that’s right, two and FOUR ZEROES, to get the car back. Looney perhaps, but not sucky. The “suck” part came later when he called us to complain. He was upset we had written “ABAND – CONTACT DMV” on the rear window with grease pen, because he couldn’t get it to wash off (uh, it’s a GREASE pen, it’s supposed to not wash off in the rain) and had to scrape the markings off with a razor blade, why did we do such a thing?! It’s very inconvenient! Ugh, some people need better hobbies, pronto!
I gotta say, I love your writing style 
Comment