David Louis Edelman’s recent blog post about speed limits reminded me to blog about my own recent experience with speed limits which was not at all happy-making.

Some time in May, I was driving my grandfather’s car because mine was in the shop. I get pulled over for speeding: 45 in a 25. But the best part was, my grandfather’s registration somehow expired, so I got a ticket for that too, plus the cop towed the car. He was a real ball-buster, this guy. For instance, if he had written me up for 19 mph over the limit, my ticket would have been $95 less. But because he wrote it for 20, the ticket is $200. Cops like this guy are why even law-abiding citizens hate cops sometimes.

Luckily, it didn’t cause a major transportation issue–I was actually working at the time, going to the post office to pick up the mail. So Gordon just came and picked me up, then gave me a ride home later, and I picked up my own car from the shop.

I didn’t even realize that stretch of road had a 25 mph limit; I didn’t even realize I was speeding. Here’s where Edelman’s a national database of speed limit information would have come in handy.

So far, all of this sucked pretty majorly, but there’s more. In the end, this turned out to be like a eight hundred dollar ticket. It was $200 for speeding, $54 for the expired registration. And I didn’t realize that they towing company was charging $35 per day for “storage,” so the car was sitting there a couple days. By the time I pick it up, it cost me $310 to get it out. And then I had to have them tow it all the way from Union City to Perth Amboy (home, 27 miles, another $175) because I couldn’t get the registration sorted out right away, and I figured by the time I waded through the red tape, it would be cheaper just to have them tow it here, rather than leave it there at $35 a day. (See, because you can’t just drive it out of the lot unless you get the registration fixed; it’s illegal for them to release it to you without a valid registration, and you can’t park an unregistered car on the street either, so I couldn’t get them to tow it to a parking space.)

And then there’s tow truck place itself. It was like a scene out of a horror novel. The bathroom was broken, and it REEKED of piss and god knows what. The driver was this giantic behemoth who looked like he didn’t even need a tow truck–he could just pull the cars with his bare hands. Kind of a scary dude. Plus he starts jabbering away in some strange language. It was Russian or some Eastern European language, I guess. His last name was something -vich. His demeanor was softened somewhat by the fact that his five-year-old kid was wandering around the office. If it wasn’t for the kid, there would have been no witnesses, and the guy could have just murdered me and took my cash and no one would have known. See, he only takes cash, and he knew I had to bring him like $500. Would have been an easy set up for a mugging.

But anyway, first, I talked to the guy on the phone, told him I’d be there in an hour. I’m there right on time, and he’s not there. No one is there. I call him; he’s out on a job. Says I should have called before I came over. I said I did call. So I have to wait like a half hour for him to come down there and take all my money. Then, he couldn’t tow it right then. He said he’d do it later that night, or the next day. So he didn’t do it that night, so I had to rearrange my work schedule so that I could be home when the tow arrived. And it took all day for them to get it over here.

So, a pretty wretched adventure all around, wouldn’t you say?