You Blockhead!
Sunday, July 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments [0]
As I drove around the corner, I noticed that the officer in a passing patrol car was looking my direction. It took me a moment, but then my stomach turned as I realized what I’d just done. I was driving the wrong direction down a one-way street! I quickly spun the car around. I guess the look of horror that crossed my face as I realized my transgression was enough for the officer, however, because I wasn’t ticketed. Or beaten like a dog with his nightstick — whatever it is they do these days when you break the law.
I suppose I was still a little jittery. I had not only just been in a car accident, but road construction had forced me onto a freeway onramp that had taken me miles out of my way. Thankfully no one was hurt in the accident and, miraculously, other than a minor scratch on the bumper, my car was no worse off for it. The unexpected detour into San Pedro also was not of any consequence as I didn’t need to make it to my intended destination at any particular time. So I guess I was lucky.
But we’re just getting started. It gets worse before it gets better.
For reasons better left unsaid, I had to visit two courthouses that Friday morning. (It just makes the story more intriguing that way, because the truth is that I just needed to pick-up some documents.) I was attempting to find my way into a parking lot near the first courthouse when I made the wrong turn. The lot was a little cheaper than the one next to it, only $4 instead of $6. After I got my car turned around, I finally managed to make my way into it.
After I got my car parked, I went to pay for my parking space at the machine at the front of the lot. I punched my parking space number into the keypad and fed three $1 bills into the designated slot. Out of bills, I pulled out four quarters and dropped them into the machine — but they were kicked back out again. I had a $10 bill, but I didn’t want to use it because a notice on the machine stated that it didn’t give back change. Spending $13 on a $4 parking space seemed like a bit much but there was no way for me to get my $3 back at this point. Unsure what to do, I desperately kept feeding the quarters into the machine over and over again in hopes that whatever was wrong with the change slot might correct itself — but it never did. As I continued to pump the quarters into the slot, praying for their acceptance, the screen blinked and the machine reset itself and I lost my money.
At this point, you really should having something by the Vince Guaraldi Trio playing in the background to get into the right frame of mind for how I was beginning to feel.
So, I moved my car to the $6 lot, paid the attendant and went and got the info I needed from the courthouse. Only I could end up spending $9 on parking by trying to park in the $4 lot. Sigh.
Afterwards, I hopped on the freeway and drove up to LA to visit the other courthouse. Of course, there were no freeway off-ramps anywhere near where I was going so I ended up having to drive far out of my way and then cut back on surface streets. When I finally got to the courthouse, I had to dig up all of the quarters I save in my car for parking meters in order to pay the $7 parking fee. I then parked my car, went up to the floor I needed but I could not find the room for which I was looking. I was also kind of noticing that there looked to be a lot more of what one might affectionately call “hardened criminals” at this courthouse than there had been at the last one. Finally, admitting defeat, I stopped an employee and asked her for help finding the room I needed and she just kind of gave me this quizzical look. It turns out? I was in the wrong courthouse. There are two, 18 blocks apart on the same street. I was in the criminal courthouse; I needed the civil courthouse.
Luckily, no one stabbed me on my way out.
Fuck you, MapQuest!
Now I was flat broke and in a part of town with which I was unfamiliar so I didn’t know where to find an ATM. I did find the correct courthouse, though. But, before I parked, I drove around for a while looking for a gas station or convenience store so I could get some cash — I finally found a SavOn. Yay!
Well, then it turned out that there was a Bank of America right next door to the courthouse. Grr.
Anyway, I parked my car and finally found the right office, but when I asked them for printouts of the document I needed, they told me that they couldn’t do that — I actually needed to go to the records office on the first floor. The records office, for those of you who have never needed to visit a courthouse, is a very special place that is operated by very special people. Very special people. People who would watch you drown to death in a swimming pool while holding a life vest in their hand; people who would stand by as you got mugged and then go double check your empty wallet after the assailant ran away; people who would watch a burglar enter your house in the dead of night and only think to wonder, after the burglar brutally murders you and your entire family in your sleep, if your house might not come to market at a price significantly lower than market value due to the blood stains and chalk outlines.
Very. Special. People.
There’s a roped off area of the records office that indicates where one should stand to see the clerk. No one was in line so I politely waited at the front of this roped-off area, made eye contact with the clerk and wait for him to call me forward — like one does in the post office or at the bank. But the clerk never did call me forward. Finally, a woman just walked straight up to the clerk and he immediately responded to her request for help. So I stood there feeling like a jackass until she finished her business, then I walked up to the window myself. The clerk just glared at me, grunted when I showed him the case number that I needed to retrieve and gave me a form to fill out.
“Um, you wouldn’t happen to have a pen I could borrow, would you?”
Now, if one was at the gym or in an ambulance I could see how this question might catch one off guard but, inside a room whose ability to function is utterly dependent upon the usage of ink pens, there were exactly zero pens available for the public to use to fill out these forms. Luckily, I managed to bum a pen off of someone. Not that it helped much — the form was written in such a way as to make it almost impossible to decipher.
By the way, it turns out that when you put in a request to gets copies of a document, they don’t actually give you copies of the document. They give you the original document and then threaten you will incarceration should you fail to return it. There’s a whole other window that copies the document. And, guess what? They have form to fill out too! And this one is three times the size of the first form and four times as difficult to decipher.
And they have ten times fewer pens for you to borrow than at the other window.
Remember when Eddie Murphy had to carry that glass of water in The Golden Child but, in order to pass the test, he could not spill a single drop of it? Getting through this office kind of felt like that.
Anyway, I finally got the documents I needed and it only cost me $6. Parking was another $9. Finding the freeway on-ramp home? I had to circle the same block three times to figure out where the southbound entrance was. Gah!
For those of you keeping count, I spent $25 on parking to retrieve $6 worth of documents. Hit it, Vince…
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