My run-in with the law

Okay, so it wasn't exactly a run-in, but it was the first illegal thing I've been busted for! Here's the story:

So on Saturday night, my friends and I attended church. After edifying our souls for an hour and a half, we decided to spend the rest of that night in good, clean fun to further bond our friendships: we decided to play a board game. As Justin # 1 puts it, "We're Christian kids-- we don't party, we don't drink, we don't do drugs-- the only thing left is playing board games and renting movies". So don't mock us! Jesse, Justin # 2 and I went to Target to get Scene It, a game our group has been coveting for awhile (that, and 90's Trivial Pursuit, yea!). Next stop was Jessica's apartment, where we met up with her, Mikey, Josh, and his wife, Enrique. Now, when we go to Jessica's apartment in big groups like this, we always park in the small dentist's parking lot next to the building, to avoid flooding the visitor parking spots for her complex. We've done this at least ten times according to Justin (I've actually only parked there twice), and nothing has ever happened. So we spent a few hours at Jessica's glorying in our new game and the gobs of extra Halloween candy that she kept feeding us. It was good clean Christian fun (and Jessica and I, the now infamous popcorn-piece "Team Estrogen", won the first ever Scene It game by a landslide :-).

So around midnight we start gathering our stuff to leave, say our good-byes, and head over to the parking lot next door, only to discover that OUR CARS ARE GONE. All four of them. Josh calls the cops, and they tell him our cars were towed for being in a tow-away zone, even though it was a freakin' dentist's office at freakin' midnight. What kind of dentist holds hours at that time of night, I don't know, but apparently some tow truck driver decided for the sake of any customers that might show up at that time, he'd better give them room to park by REMOVING OUR CARS AND IMPOUNDING THEM. I must admit, I said a bad word. (In my defense, it was a quote from a movie, not something that technically came out of my own head.) The tow company told Josh our cars would be two hundred and seventy dollars a piece to get out, but when Josh asked about the group discount rate, the guy knocked it down to two fifty. Swell.

So after Mikey drove Enrique and me to their apartment to pick up their other car, and then we drove back to Jessica's to pick up the boys who were standing there, in the middle of the downtown El Cajon area at midnight and freezing, the five of us were on our way to reclaim our cars, by force if necessary. During the ride we contemplated TP-ing the place some other night, and Jesse realized that now he had something to write about in his xanga. Brilliant. Justin decided it was all an act of God to give us something interesting to write about in the online journal cult. As a result, Josh ended up learning about xanga and blogs, his interest was peeked, and the next morning at church we gave him our site addresses. If you're reading this, HI JOSH!

So the guy was waiting for us, and proceeded to drag the process of giving our cars back for another half an hour to forty-five minutes, while we all stood outside freezing. He was a little chatty, and seemed to forget we were probably in a hurry at that time of night. I did feel a little sorry for him though, when he told us that his wife (or girlfriend?) had left him awhile back. He also told us we were the nicest people who had ever come back to buy back their cars (for even though we had been quite threatening and plotful on the car ride over, we were actually very polite when face-to-face with said enemy). So here are my two conclusions on that: either there have never been any other Christians to get their car towed by this particular guy (great, we're going to hell now), or any other Christians who have gotten their car towed were just as jerky about it as anybody else would be, and that's sad.

So to sum up the night, the five of us had a very good bonding experience outdoing each other in useless movie trivia and finished off the night with a two hundred and fifty dollar short missions trip to the Lakeside towing yard.