Saturday, December 15, 2007

Car Troubles...

My car has been a very frustrating part of my life for the past couple of weeks, and it all came to a head this weekend. The first thing that you should know is that it's always been very hard to lock myself out of my car. I have this number pad on that outside of my passenger door that I can use to type in a code that will let me into my car even if the keys are inside. However, when I went to Buffalo, NY for Thanksgiving I made the unwise decision to remove snow from my side windows by lowing the windows all the way down. Instead of the snow falling outwards, as I would have liked, it fell inwards. "Eh, what the hell," I thought. "It's just water. Nothing the interior of my car can't handle." Think again Nels!

The next day my power locks stopped working, along with the "one-touch" window lowering functionality and my keypad. Looking at my car's manual, I could see that all three of those items were on the same fuse, so I figure the water must have shorted it out. "Oh well," I thought. "I'll put in a new fuse at some point."

Flash forward to Thursday night! I discover two parking tickets on my car, $25 each. Apparently my residential parking pass expired a month earlier than I though. I was really lucky there were only two, since I basically never drive my car. I talked with my roommates, and they gave me the "visitor's" parking pass, because we only get two real parking passes per address. It says things like, "you may not use this on your own car" and "may never be used for more than 5 consecutive business days" all over it. I am worried.

Sure enough I discover a third parking ticket on my car last night. The description says, "Using Own VPass." Boo. That's three parking tickets in three days, for those of you playing along at home. And at this point I am not entirely sure where I am going to put my car on a regular basis. Status: Still Unresolved

Nonetheless, this morning I decide to try and get the fuse in my car fixed, and in the process of pulling the old fuse out of my car, proceed to lock my keys inside. No number pad to bail me out this time, because it was precisely what I was trying to fix at that very moment. I don't know what to do. I go inside Pep Boys. They don't have the fuse I want. They don't have a door opening service. I call up AAA, join, and they send some guy out. On the Rad Side, I got to see the AAA man jimmy open my lock with a Slim Jim. I think I'm going to buy one of those. On the Bad Side, after I got back into my car, I went to Car Quest, found the correct fuse, and it still didn't fix the problem. All this while I was supposed to be working on my paper! Status: Still Unresolved

2 comments:

  1. How can you get a ticket for using your own visitor's pass when it was your roommate's visitor's pass? Also, had you scraped off your expired real pass, before applying the visitor's one? I've never known them to enforce the 5-day limit too strictly (i.e. at all).

    There is permit-free parking east of Maryland, or perhaps College, but that's quite a ways away from your place..

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  2. I agree - you're using your roomate's visitors pass and not your own. Furthermore, you can just switch off which or your roomates' visitors pass you use every 5 days, thus neatly resolving the whole issue! Now try and argue this with your parking enforcer.

    Good Luck, see you in a week!
    Rand

    P.S. Owning a Slim Jim has been a dream for a while. Let me know how it goes.

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