Dude…where’s my car?

Tahoe, in a weird sort of way, seems to be the place I go to take care of life’s little challenges.  Last time, I had been on the hunt (for weeks) for a passport office that was open when I arrived.  I hadn’t taken a shower in four days, and those had been four very hot, sweaty, cycling-across-Nevada-in-July days.  If ever there were a passport photo that could make a grubby Peace Corps Volunteer look great in real life, that was it.  Thank God they invalidated that one when I closed my service.

This time, I will be contesting a parking ticket.  That’s because yesterday, when I walked out of my office with a box full of “for your personal files” papers, band-aids, running shorts, a bike pump, and other desk drawer sundries, my car was gone.  I spun around slowly to make sure I was on the correct corner of Constitution Avenue and that this was still the FTC building behind me.  Yep.  Then I kept walking towards the road hoping that maybe, somehow, my car was hidden behind that electric blue Saturn to my left (although I thought it had been parked behind me).  Nope.  I looked from right to left and wondered if perhaps I was nuts and had parked somewhere else.  Nope, unfortunately I had the full capacity of all my senses and my car was gone.  I stopped in the middle of the wide pebbled sidewalk, arched my back to rest the bottom edge of the box on my hip bones, and stared at the empty curb in front of me.  Really?!  Could it be that my car has been stolen?!  On this crisply warm and orange Friday, which I had definitively declared to be the perfect day for quitting my job[1], my eyes suddenly felt like beady, gooey jellyfish about to burst.

A man with an FTC badge was roaming around nearby, so I approached him: “Excuse me, sir, have you seen anybody drive away in a blue Jetta?” I asked, both chuckling from the absurdity and skipping over the words in panic.

“Nah,” he replied.  “Wait wait, where’d you park?”

“Right there!” I pointed, “Not fifteen minutes ago!”

“Ohhhh,” he said knowingly, “this happened to me once.  They probably relocated it.  You can’t park there during rush hour.”

“Aww man!  See, I wondered that!”  I responded excitedly, and he walked with me over to the curb, about 50 feet ahead of where I had parked.  “See look,” I began, pointing to a sign with green writing, above me.  “That sign says ‘2 hour parking, 9:30 AM-6:30 PM, Monday-Friday.  But then that sign,” I pointed to a red-lettered sign above the green one, “says ‘no parking 4:00 PM-6:30 PM, Monday-Friday.’  That’s confusing, right?  What are you supposed to believe?”  I had parked at 4:20 PM.

The man nodded sympathetically, “Yeah.  Oh yeah actually, yeah…that’s confusing.”

“But so what I did was, I backed up to where that car is,” pointing again to the Saturn.  “I figured I’d see what that sign says.  And that post only has the green sign on it.  ‘2 hour parking, 9:30-6:30,’ no red sign.  So I figured, I guess I can’t park up here, but I can park back there, so I did.”

The man nodded again; he was very nice to put up with my ranting.

“But I mean, what if I’d never driven up here?!  I never would have even seen the red sign!….I’m sorry, this is obviously not your problem….Wait, what do you mean ‘relocated?’”

“Oh.  Well, what they do is, since this is a major thoroughfare, they don’t let ya park here during rush hour.  So they come through and they move your car, but not very far.  It’s probably just parked on a side street somewhere.  So ya gotta call that number,” he pointed to the “if towed” number on the sign, “and give them your tag number, and then they tell you where your car is….But don’t call that number.  They’ll just give you the runaround and you won’t get through to anybody.  You know your tag number, right?”

“Oh shoot, no…”  I am a complete idiot in certain fundamental ways.

“Oh.  Well, ya gotta know your tag number.  Try and figure out your tag number, and then what I did was, I called 911, and they told me where my car was.”

I scoffed, and saw a DCDOT tow truck drive by on Constitution.

“But I didn’t find my car where they told me it was.  I actually found it on the way to go find it, parked on Indiana Avenue.”  Indiana Avenue is across the street from the FTC, on the other side of the building from where we were standing.

“Hah!  Ok…thanks!”  So I lugged my load back into the FTC building, where I had to put the box through security even though I had walked out of the building with it five minutes earlier.  While that was happening, I dialed the “if towed” number, navigated seven minutes’ worth of auto-menus, left a voice mail, called 911, and got put on hold when I finally got connected to a voice with a heartbeat.  I put the call on speakerphone while I waited, and shuffled back to my office.

I opened the door to find my boss Pablo seated at my office mate’s desk while a crisply dressed young professional stood over him and fed him papers to sign.  He looked up like he owned the place and said, “Oh!  Hi Parrish!  This is Greg.  He was an intern here last summer….”  We shook hands and before I could explain to them that my speakerphone was turned on, a voice came blasting through.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, yes, did you find it?”  I fumbled around trying to wake up the screen on my Droid to turn off the speakerphone.

“Well I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t have any record of that car.”  I asked her how long it usually takes for a “relocated car” to be entered into the system and explained that for all I knew, my car had been stolen, not relocated!  I tried to keep the pitch of my voice from heading skyward.  “Well ma’am, usually it’s put in immediately, but let me refer you over to the folks at 311 and see if they can find your car for you.  If they can’t, then you can call back in 20 or 30 minutes, and if they still don’t find it, then I’d file a police report.”

“Ok yeah, that’d be great,” shaking my head and wondering if it would take filing a stolen car report to find my relocated car.  As Pablo and Greg continued to hand papers back and forth, I emailed my friends Sally and Sam to tell them that I was going to be a little late to happy hour; my car had disappeared.

After 311 couldn’t find my car either, I got a chance to explain the whole situation to Pablo.  An attorney to the core, he asked lots of seemingly (but not actually) irrelevant questions and posed a solution to the challenge.  “Wait, where are you going?”

“I’m going to Tahoe.”

“Right now?”

“Oh!  No, right now I’m just trying to go down to H Street, to meet some friends.  But tomorrow morning I’m going to Tahoe.”

“And are you going to drive there?”

“No, I’m flying…”

“And you can’t change your trip?”

“No.  Well I mean, I could, but…well no.”

“Hmm, know what you should do?  Before you leave town, write up a power of attorney to designate to someone the authority to pick up your car for you.”  I hadn’t even thought of the possibility that they wouldn’t find my car before I left town, but he was right; the last thing I wanted was for my car to get impounded.  A couple of weeks ago they found a dead body in the trunk of a car at the DC impound lot.  My poor little Jetta!  In that environment!

I started writing a power of attorney to designate to Sam the authority to go pick up my car, and Sally took to the streets to look for my car.  Just as I darted out of my office on the way to photocopy my driver license, Sam’s phone rang.

“Hey what’s up?…..Oh, you did?…..Where was it?…..Ok cool we’ll be over there in a bit.”

“Did she find my car?!”

“Yeah she said it’s parked in front of Au Bon Pain.”

There it was, on Indiana Avenue, with a $100 parking ticket on the windshield, right in the shadow of the federal agency that files suit over deceptive claims.

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[1] It’s not that I disliked my job, but there’s something exhilaratingly frightening about leaving one thing and moving onto the next, like jumping across a wide crevasse.