A Saturday
Dancing is a passion of mine. For most people this comes as a bit of a surprise, but I’ve taken 4 semesters of social dance classes of one kind or another, and if I may toot my own horn a bit, I must say I am pretty dang good. This semester I’m taking Ballroom II, a class with a delightfully disproportionate number of guys to girls. Learning all their names is a challenge, but two months into the semester, I’m up to about 80%.
Nichole, a cute biology/theater teaching major, is one of my favorite girls to dance with, and it only took me two weeks to remember her name. Generally, I don’t like to ask girls in my dance classes out until then end of the semester, as I have to keep seeing them regularly, and if it goes bad, I'll still have to dance "danger close" when she comes around in the rotation for practicing the tango - awkward! Nothing is worse than a cold mutual dislike in a hot Latin dance. I decided to make an exception for Nichole. I really should have stuck to my conduct rule, but she was just so dang cute! I first asked her out to a Chinese festival, but she couldn’t go, so I decided that would just ask her out for ice cream the next day. She told me “that sounds benign enough.” That’s exactly what she said. What does that even mean? I know what the word benign means, but what did SHE mean by using it to describe a date with me?
The ice cream date went well. She seemed like a delightful girl that was worth getting to know. Towards the end, she mentioned that she wanted to go to The Music Man, which was being performed at a local theater. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a second date, so I asked her if I could take her to the 1:30 showing on Saturday. She said yes.
Saturday was a double-date-day. I took a girl named Joslyn out at 11:00, and since Nichol conveniently lived in the same building, I was able to make it so I only had five minutes in between the dates.
We drove to the theater and I started the parking spot search. On 100 South, there was a strip of worn out asphalt on the other side of the curb. It didn’t look like a parking lot, and there were no signs saying no parking, plus it was next to a canal, so I figured it was on the canal easement, and was fair game for parking. Obtuse expectations of Freddy.
The show was nice. Nichole was nice enough. The boot wheel lock I found on my car after the show got out was not. Another lady had parked behind me, and she too had been booted. She was one of those confrontational people. I called the number to get my car debooted. I decided that it would be worth it to find out all I could about the exact legal particulars of the case. That took a while. In the meantime, the lady who had parked behind me called the cops. That made everything more exciting. The booter-man called his booter-boss to join the party. After a rousing discussion about easements, signage, and city codes, I determined that any legal recourse would be tedious. Darling Nichol needed to go home, so she called someone to pick her up and left me. I decided it would be a good idea to call and check the funds in my account to see if I could afford to get the boot off. They were shorter, or I was taller, I’m not sure which, but either way, I had a problem. I had to call and make a funds transfer. In the meantime, the heartless shell of a man that administers the booting had to go deboot someone else.
As I was standing there waiting for a knight in shining armor to come by and use his lance to impale the booter guy's truck tires, the next best thing to a K.I.S.A., a very nice fat man from some foreign country like Armenia or something, walked up. He was the owner of Logan’s Hero’s sandwich shop. He commiserated with me about my booting woes. He told me a great story of when he was attending Utah State, and he was so poor that he had to steal some fishing lures from Fred Meyers and use them to catch fish up at first dam so that he could eat. He then walked into his shop, emerged with three bags of pitas and some frozen chicken thighs, and told me that they were to help my day go better. He drove off, and I was left standing there, realizing that I had to pee.
As I looked around for some place to… relieve myself… those magical little yellow boots on my tire caught my eye… what a relief it was. Nobody could see me, so... hehehehehe...
And then I started thinking about where I was…relieving myself of the steel jaws of financial death. I urinated all over both of the boots. ALL over them.
When the guy came back, his card reader was out of batteries. He only discovered this after he spent 6 minutes trying to use it to scan my card. We then had to wait 15 more minutes for the owner of the booting company to make another guest appearance in this magical production of the play I’m calling "My Dating Game: The Dark Chapters" (an autobiographical musical). As the soulless wonder released my trusty steed, I just sat there and smiled. The steel jaws of financial death had dried by that point, but some things don't evaporate. It was not nice, it was not kind, it was not sanitary, but for $75.00 it was totally justifiable.
I think I should wire some M18 Claymore mines to my hubcaps, with a sign that says “Any attempt to boot will result in mine detonation.” That ought to keep those lousy booters away!
