Well, Chicago has all these weird diagonal streets and one-way streets that make it pretty dang confusing when you are unfamiliar with the territory. And these were the days before Google Maps could tell you exactly where to turn to get there. We drove around and around, trying to locate the Guitar Center and finally found where it was. Then we had to find a place to park, since there wasn't any available. If navigating all the weird streets was difficult, parking was impossible. We ended up finally finding this lot several blocks away with one spot open, so I snagged it real quick and we went to Guitar Center. But when we were returning to the car, all my joy from being in Guitar Center turned into horror as I saw my beast of a car being attached to a tow truck.
We ran to the car before the guy pulled out of the lot, and asked what was going on. He just pointed to a "No Parking" sign on a building that was fairly distant from where I had parked. I tried to reason with him that we hadn't seen the sign and begged him to let the car down. He just kind of stared at the ground like I was speaking gibberish. Seeing that he wasn't going to let it go, I asked if I could just pay him the fee and then have him let the car down. He said he couldn't do that, so he gave us an address for where we could pick up the car and drove off. That really sucked.
It was starting to get later in the evening as we were walking to the address, which the tow truck guy had told us was "just down the road." But we had been walking for a good 45 minutes and it was getting dark. We all agreed we should get a taxi, so we waved down a cab and hopped in. When we told the cab driver our story and where we wanted to go, he just looked blankly at us and then said "You never would have made that walking." Great. He ended up driving a good twenty minutes, which turned into an expensive cab ride. When he got to the towing company's vehicle impounding lot, he parked and said, "Listen, just get your car and get out of here. You don't want to hang around here." Awesome. We get out and look around. The cab driver peels out and speeds off the second we got out. It's a run-down looking place, and it's quiet and it's dark.
The fence around the lot is a good twelve feet high with spiral barbed wire along the top. It looks like a maximum security prison. When we walk past the gate, we notice a row of huge, iron spikes pointing toward the inside of the lot at about thigh level, daring anyone to try to ram the gate open with their vehicle from the inside. When we arrived at the "office," which was a square, reinforced brick structure with a tiny window about the size of a shoebox, complete with iron bars running vertically, my thought was, "I'm never going to get my car back." But lo and behold, someone was inside that little brick building with the shoebox sized window with iron bars. They wouldn't let us see who they were though. I paid for the car, interacting with a couple of hands visible in the window. They slipped me my change and opened the gate, and we quickly got in the car and drove back to the college. Nice time.
The guys all chipped in to help pay for the towing fee, which was nice since I didn't have over a hundred bucks just laying around for free distribution. Truth be told, I really wanted to argue with the towing company about how they messed up our evening, but once we got there I decided that was a bad idea if I wanted to get my car back. That wasn't the last time we all went to Guitar Center together, but after that we chose to go to a different one out in the suburbs that had parking and was easier to find.
