Bleeding again

Guess what mode of transportation is as expensive as an ambulance...............? Well? While you are thinking I will start giving you some clues:

Last Friday (19 Dec) we decided to hang out with V's work friends so we drove downtown, but we arrived 2 hours late...long story... ok, ok, I'll explain it. I went with Jal shopping on Friday instead of Saturday, because I decided I would like to work from home Saturday and spend Friday shopping around.

So I came back a bit late from the shopping (and by "a bit" I mean 0.5 hours late) a bit after the time when we should have already left. V was not happy, he was pouting like a little boy, and we started leaving around 9. Btw the party started at 8 actually (Indonesian time == 9 pm).

Along the way, I was telling him everything that happened that day at work, taaalking talking talking non-stop, and somehow (who knows how), he missed his exit and decided to take the path using his own internal GPS. His internal GPS is either very very reliable or about the same as driving around and taking random turns until we get somewhere sort-of familiar.

At the end we found the place, but we were 2 hours late already. When we were turning into the street we were supposed to turn into, we actually missed the turn and took a different back alley.... a small road behind a rental building - but by the way, no, the answer to the question is not about getting a ticket for going the wrong way.

But we could see his friend's house from the parking lot. He decided to park behind someone's else car, under a tree, where there wasn't actually a parking spot, near a window and with no towing sign. Of course I told him to park somewhere else, but he convinced me that it would be ok since there was no sign and we would be able to see our car from his friend's place just in case anything happened.

We had fun at the party - learned a new card game (cribbage) and got to know V's coworkers. Then around 12 we decided to leave since everyone else had left, too. We walked to our car, and he noticed that the remote did not open the car -- not long after that he said "omg, our car is gone" ..... yup yup yup our car got TOWED. So in the middle of the really cold weather, in the middle of the night, we were looking for a phone number of the car towing company. Finally found it, and I noticed the minimum price of the towing "$280" - bye bye Christmas gifts and dinners and lunches.

His friend was nice enough to drive us there, but we didn't see any ATM on our way to the towing company location. V decided that he won't use credit card since they will charge 15$ extra while using ATM is only 3.50$ extra. Turned out we have to pay exact cash $276.31 - we had to withdraw cash twice from the ATM (there was a 200$ max per drawing). So altogether it cost us $7 to withdraw the cash (but at least it wasn't as bad as the $15 "convenience fee" for credit cards). He was being stingy to the towing company - no more extra money for them.

Then his friend had to go back to his car and scrape out $6.06 but we still needed 25 more cents. Thankfully there were 2 ladies who needed to pick up their car too and they had extra cash, and donated us 25 cents. Those jerks behind the bullet-proof glass at the office were just smiling to themselves as we tried to count out the change. We walked to the car and the guy in the compound told us that he just towed the car an hour ago.

So our car got a $276.31 Christmas gift - a free ride to the middle of nowhere, being held hostage in car-prison, and probably being molested by some of the dirty old trucks there. I don't know if his car will think about it that way, but for me it was definitely like his car going to prison for an hour. I think the car towing tops the price of the ambulance. Hehehhe we will find out soon when we get the bill from hospital :) That's our generous Christmas donation to the medical industry and the car-towing industry, to boost this economy. If the economy turns around next year, trust us, it's not Obama, it's our $1 billion stimulus package for the Minneapolis/St.Paul area.

December has not been the best month for V :(
Hopefully I can keep him out of the trouble next year...