smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

I have a ton of pictures from our weekend in Montreal to show you — I guess that should be tonne, rather — but it’ll have to wait until I relive yesterday’s car towing experience. If you follow me on the Twitter (and really, why wouldn’t you? I’m delightful!) or even the Tumblr (ditto! Plus with more cat!) then you might have already seen the tale, but I’m telling it again. Frankly, it’s the most dramatic thing to happen to me since . . . I lost my job? And even that was pretty low key. So I think this deserves proper blog treatment. Plus, I think this is one of those rites-of-passage deals, so after almost eight years of residency I think I can now state unequivocally: I AM A NEW YORKER.

We drove to Montreal in a rental car, thinking the trip would be a) not very long, and b) pretty. It’s certainly a beautiful drive, but I have no idea how people make this trip in 5.5 or 6 hours, as I’d been hearing from people (seriously, people? How fast do you drive, and what weird off-hours times are you driving?), because it took us 8. And we left late on Sunday and hit all sorts of inexplicable traffic and didn’t come to a stop in front of my apartment until about 7:30 PM, at which point I was all, “OMG there is a spot right here in front of the apartment how lucky is that? Wait, what’s that sign say? No Standing 7AM-10AM Mon-Fri?” And my brain stopped. I sort of knew what it meant, but sort of thought it meant something other than what it meant. And I think I also just didn’t want to think about it, and neither did Dan. We just wanted to be out of the car.

You can imagine where this is going. At 7:45 the next morning, I left the apartment to return the car, and the car was gone. All the cars on the street were gone, so I knew that the car had been towed because of a parking violation. But I don’t drive in the city (OBVIOUSLY) and while I had a vague idea of where the tow pound lot was, I didn’t know how to go about getting the car back. So I went back upstairs and Googled something like “Brooklyn car towing” and found out that the pound — conveniently located in the scenic Navy Yard area of Brooklyn (and actually not all that far from me, so I remember thinking in the back of my head, “Well, it’s hot as blazes out, but I could walk there”) — opens for business at 8:00 AM. It was 7:50 AM, but I called anyway. A woman picked up right away, and I told her that I thought my car had been towed, and asked how I could find out for sure. I was told to call back around 8:15, after everyone at the office had a chance to settle in. No problem. I called Enterprise, both to tell them that I wouldn’t be returning the car at 8 AM as originally planned, and also to get the license plate information, because I figured I’d need it, and of course — of course! — I’d left the registration and contract in the glove compartment, like I always do. (Note to self: don’t do that again.) The guy I talked to at Enterprise was very sympathetic and very understanding, and after he gave me all the info I needed told me to call them back if the pound gave me any problems.

Problems? The voice in the back of my head peeped up. What problems? Is this going to be made doubly difficult because it’s a rental car?

I called the pound again at 8:20 AM, gave them the car info, and was told that the car wasn’t there, but that could mean that it hadn’t been put in the system yet. “When was it towed?” I was asked. How the hell should I know? I told her it would have been within the last 12 hours. They DID have a blue Chevy with Massachusetts plates that had been towed from a street that the woman sort of mumbled at me (Greene? Grove? Something starting with GR) and that wasn’t it, though I had a prickly thought that it just might be (the odds would suggest as much) and something got lost in translation. But I was told to call back in another 40 minutes, to give the pound time to process the car. Fine. I called back at about 9:00 AM and was told again that the car wasn’t there. Did that mean it wasn’t THERE, or did that mean it hadn’t been entered in the system yet? I asked. It could go either way, I was told, and then advised to call back even later. I was getting a little nervous; the hourly rate on the rental was adding up and I hadn’t even thought about how much it would cost to get the car out of the tow pound, but I kept my voice level and asked how much time I should give them. She couldn’t tell me. OK then.

Next I called the police precinct, as another website had advised. The first person I talked to there said that it could take hours for the car to get processed at the pound (gah), but then he transferred me to another person who might be able to tell me if the car had turned up already. Not sure how she would have known before the pound, but maybe there’s paperwork that gets filled out in triplicate and the precinct office gets a copy. Not that I’m overthinking this or anything. The woman I talked to was very nice and said that she couldn’t find any record of the car at any pound, and suggested that it might have been towed by a private tow company, and my best course of action would be to call 911. Really? I asked. 911? I mean, this isn’t exactly an emergency. The only way to find out if a private tow company had my car was to call 911? Yes. And besides, she said, you don’t really know for sure whether your car has been stolen. (Though I was pretty sure I did know — who would steal a 2009 Chevy Aveo?)

So I called 911. And I felt icky doing it, like I was taking away someone else’s access to report a legitimate emergency. I talked to an incredibly surly and harried-sounding operator who made me feel even worse about calling, especially since she talked SO fast that I had to ask her to repeat her questions more than a few times. She dispatched a police car, I listened to a recording telling me that the officers in my area are busy responding to other calls and I might have to wait a while — that was probably the scariest part of this whole experience, because I couldn’t help but think that someone calling about a break-in or assault would have the same recording, and the idea that these two reports would be treated in the same way? Not cool. I hope to whatever deity is in charge that I never have to find out if that’s true.

Two officers drove up about five minutes later. They told me that my car was most likely at the pound, gesturing toward the sign I had misinterpreted. I agreed, and told them that I’d called the pound a few times already and had been told the car wasn’t there. Then they offered to drive me (or us, since Dan had come downstairs by that point) to the pound, which I thought was above and beyond what they were required to do in a non-emergency situation like that.

So I got to ride in a cop car. And can I tell you? There is NO leg room in the back of police cars. NONE.

But they did turn the siren on, just for a little bloop, and I’m not sure if that was for our benefit or to get through a red light. Doesn’t matter. I didn’t let on to Dan, but I was sort of enjoying the experience.

See, if you know me at all well, you know that I do let the small stuff get to me. I wish I didn’t, and I do try not to, but it does. Or rather, one small stressful thing I can handle. Two small stressful things I can mostly manage. If you’re going to come at me with a third small stressful thing while I am already dealing with two other small stressful things, I may have to cut you.

But I am really good at the big stuff.

I mean, part of it is that I accept full responsibility for being an idiot. It’s my own damn fault the car got towed. But part of it is also that I have always, thanks to my own experience working in customer service, taken a flies-with-honey approach to these sorts of situations. Anyone who can potentially facilitate the result I want should be treated as an ally, not an enemy. Moreover, not only does it require less energy to be pleasant to people, it actually helps you feel better about everything as well. Such is my philosophy.

We got to the pound, the cops got out and asked one of the guys working outside (as opposed to the clerks on the inside) if he could look for the car, and within 2 minutes the answer came back: “Yeah, it’s here.” (Of course it was there.) He wrote down a number (a locating number? Intake number?) on the piece of paper one of the cops had used to copy down the car’s info, and gave it to me to bring inside.

It was early enough that there was only one person ahead of us, which was another small break the universe decided to throw us. But when I got to the window and handed over the slip of paper, the clerk looked it up on the computer and then told me the car wasn’t there. (Pause to consider our over-reliance on computers.) I told her that we’d just arrived with the police and was told by someone outside that the car was indeed there, and pointed to the circled number he’d written down. She looked again at the number and then walked to the back and disappeared, I can only guess to talk to someone outside, or check some other log, or something. She came back after about 5 minutes and wrote up a sort of receipt that allowed me to get to the car and come back with the rental agreement which, if you’ll recall, was in the glove compartment.

I was taken by van — only I could go, since the car was in my name — to the car. It’s a strange protocol, though I sort of understand why they would want to control who goes in and out of the lot. And the woman driving the van was pretty terrific. She sympathized with us (there was another woman there picking up her car), saying all the parking rules were bullshit designed to confuse everyone. On our way back to the office area, she stopped to hand out water and iced tea to the people working outside at the gate, and it occurred to me that someone else might get really impatient and snippy at this (short) delay. But you know, it was 9:30 or so in the morning and already felt like 110 degrees outside, and these people are in their heavy NYPD uniforms, and I thought it was sweet of the van escort driver to bring them all something to drink. You know? I liked her. And then we sat in the van and talked about one of the women working there who has three kids and how she and her husband split the child care but it’s really hard with their different schedules and sometimes they just sit in the car for an hour or so waiting for one of their parents to get off work, or for the summer day care place to open. And you know why? Because that’s the only affordable option they have. I told the van driver that I’d been out of work for a year and she looked at me with wide eyes and said that’s horrible — maybe thinking how bad it was that I now have to pony up $185 to get my car that isn’t even my car back when I don’t have a steady source of income. I don’t know. In the midst what should have been a seriously stressful moment, this was kind of relaxing. Should you have the misfortune of needing to get your car out of the Navy Yard tow pound, be nice to the van driver. She deserves it.

A five-minute wait later I was back at the window with my rental agreement, ready to pay this fee and get the hell out of there. The clerk was a little chatty but I didn’t mind so much, and while she was filling out my payment receipt we talked about the weather, and the tree branch that fell in Central Park and how devastating that was, etc. Receipt in hand, I went back outside to wait for the van, this time with a woman who had brought her two kids with her. Protocol prohibits bringing a stroller into the van for whatever reason, so the van driver said they had to walk. I asked if I could walk with them, just to get to my car that much quicker, and that was fine. The mom also seemed to be in relatively good humor, despite having to deal with two small boys who were clearly (and to be fair, understandably) bored, all while dealing with the hassle of being at the tow pound when it was eleventy jillion degrees. We joked about getting the grand tour of the tow pound. And then I got to my car, took the ticket off the windshield without looking at what that damage was — knowing it would be steep I knew I wasn’t fully prepared to deal with it — and went to collect Dan and then return the car, which happened without further incident.

We hit the Enterprise (not too far from the tow pound) at about 10:00 AM. That’s right — this whole adventure, from the moment I realized the car was gone to dropping it off at the rental place, took just a little over two hours. I think we got off lucky. And we got ourselves a little happy ending as well, because the manager at the Enterprise office — who said ours wasn’t the only rental that got towed that morning — said he wasn’t going to charge us for the additional hours. That saves about $45, more than a drop in the bucket, and I’m grateful for that reprieve. And of course it means I am more likely to rent from Enterprise again.

The ticket, by the way,

is $115.

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