Dude... where's my car?!

Got up a little late this morning, 20 minutes after the time when I was supposed to move our car. I got up begrudgingly and walked to the spot where we left the car. The street had been swept clean of all vehicles. Still trying to wrap my head around what that meant, I spoke with a crossing guard on the next corner, who only mustered "I didn't see anything."

I walked 2 blocks to the police department, thinking about how ironic it was that this happened the morning after I realized that my congresswoman lives around the corner from me (we tried to park behind her shiny blue SUV, but couldn't fit). At the PD, they told me that it would take another 15 minutes before they could find out if it had been towed, or if it didn't come up on their system, whether I'd have to come back and file a report. They wished me luck with the phone call to the DOT, since "they haven't been picking up their phone lately."

I walked back to my apartment, not at all anxious to tell my partner that her car of 8 years was missing. It was not the best way to start friday morning, not even mentioning my pounding headache.  She took the news very well, and we waited until 8 AM, when we were to call the DOT to figure out if they had our car. Meanwhile, I found the site online where I could check, and to our relief, our car came up.

So I took a cab to the Brooklyn Navy Yards, stood in line, and went through the process to claim my car. After the relief of finding the car wore off, the annoyance at why the car was towed at all became my primary emotion. I began to think "wait, there wasn't any sign up that said tow-away zone, and I don't have any outstanding tickets on the car... isn't this excessive?"

When I was shuttled out into the lot of hundreds of cars, I was apprehensive about ours. Over the months together, we had anthropomorphized the car to the point of her naming it. When I saw the little car in this big lot, it had a sort of dejected and forlorn look on its grill, if you buy that whole Herbie the Lovebug emotional thing. I almost muttered an apology as I drove the car out of the lot.

Aside from the time off from work that I needed to take care of this mess, I had to take a cab, and the charge for towing the car was a smooth $185. On top of that was the actual parking ticket, for $60. I couldn't believe it. I'm going to fight this - because I can't believe that they can charge that much. It's literally, highway robbery.