I recently had a serious attack of airhead. So bad in fact that it qualifies me as a serious contender for numpty of the year award.
In fact it was party the fault of crappy hire cars. You see while I love cars, bikes, engines etc it turns out that I have absolutely no interest in cars that are, well, not interesting. The offending vehicle was a grey Ford Focus (see? that’s pretty dull).
Anyway, I had driven the offending vehicle down to Palo Alto to meet a friend for dinner. I was running uncharacteristically late when I arrived in town and then struggled to find a parking space. I drove round and round, up and down, totally ruining any sense of direction I had cultivated, before eventually finding a space. I have had *ahem* recognition issues with the offending car in the past so I used technology to help me. I dropped a pin on my car park helper app and hurried off to the restaurant. Note to self – don’t rely so much on technology.
Dinner was fabulous catching up with my friend and as a result I was surrounded by a happy aura as I walked back to my car. Which wasn’t there. I even checked my app. I was right next to the electronic pin I’d dropped but the car definitely wasn’t there. But some rather suspicious red lines on the kerb were. So I’d obviously been towed. Great.
In denial I paced around around a bit to make sure I wasn’t just off by a few metres…but no luck. So I called the local police:
“Hello, I think you may have towed my car. How do I get it back?”
“What makes you think we’ve towed it?”
“It’s not where I parked it and nobody goes joyriding in a Focus…” He had the decency to laugh
“Do you know the town well?” By this he clearly meant “Obviously you are foreign so may have mistaken the street”
Pah, I know where I parked it, I even used an app.
But they hadn’t towed it.
The nice policeman sent one of his colleagues in a black and white over to help. Said second nice policewoman then took my keys and proceeded to drive around with them randomly clicking the alarm switch at parked cars (funnily enough I’ve done the same in many a car park). Anyway, she came back soon after, handed the keys back and said “It’s just over there around the corner….”. It was maybe 50m away around the corner. I had walked straight past the invisible vehicle to get to where I thought it would be.
Oh the shame. What is wrong with me?
I have to say though that the police were fabulous. My previous interaction with the constabulary has involved me being stopped for alleged speeding. I apologised for being an idiot, and they said that this happens all the time. There you go – I am sure it doesn’t happen all the time but they were being nice…Hurrah for the Palo Alto police and their kind and respectful treatment of numpties. Boo for cars that are so boring they are invisible.