Beware #2

Yesterday turned out to be a very expensive day. Having returned from my walk I received a call from Matthew. He told me our car had been towed (a sign that reads "No Standing at Anytime" really means "No Parking at Anytime") and gave me the number to find out exactly where the car was sitting. I called the number and after pressing way too many buttons I got to talk to someone who told me I had to call this other number. This second number led me to someone who didn't know what Canada or Nova Scotia was (we had to provide the place the car had been registered) and who had a hard time understanding that my car was an Oldsmobile not a Lumina and that it was green not blue, and "no there was no chance someone would have even considered it to be blue..." She finally gave me another number to call. The third number led me to someone who wasn't familiar with NS but was able to figure out which car was mine and was kind enough to explain to me where their tow pound was and what we would need to do to get it back which included paying the towing -$185.00.

Matthew came back from work and told me he had gotten a ticket that morning because he was parked too close to a fire hydrant, that one was $150.00. We hopped on the subway to go get our car. The subway didn't go as far as we needed to go so we had some walking to do. We knew that, but we didn't know just how far we'd have to walk. After a while we saw a NYPD tow truck (they're the ones who towed us) and stopped to ask him where the pound was. He looked at us and said "are you walking?? (I could have been really snarky but the guy was nice and had a good sense of humour) he gave us the directions and we continued our journey. It took us an hour's walk to get there. Once we entered the office we found out we'd have to wait for another long while as many people had tempted fate that day. It took us two hours of waiting to finally get the wonderful green slip that allowed us to take our car back. When Matthew got to the window there was another ticket, that one was for the parking violation which the towing fee did not include- $115.00. That's when I understood why the young lady next to us had decided to donate her car to a charity instead of redeeming it.

After all this grueling affair we were just so excited to get home, but that's not how it was meant to end. Matthew got in the car (I had to wait outside of the parking lot because of regulations) and... the car wouldn't start! I couldn't believe it. After all this effort at trying to get it out of jail the thing decides it likes it there and wants to stay. We had to wait for someone to come and boost us but that wasn't working. Matthew kept trying and at 9:59pm the guy said "I'm off at 10:00", Matthew asked to try one more time. He tried and the car STARTED! A miracle at the end of the day! We drove off, VERY thankful to have a car back and to have prayers answered.

In our attempt to get home Matthew drove the wrong way onto a one way street (I can vouch for him that there were no signs showing it to be a one way), a cop saw us and stopped us. At this point we just laughed. How ridiculous could this get? The cop was very understanding and only gave us a warning. Matthew said that he'd probably seen how much money we had given NY today! We made it home without any further obstacle.