Well, I am so exhausted right now, and I had this huge, detailed post in mind to go over what happened yesterday and today, but I'm really pooped, and I've got work tomorrow, so I'll give you a summary. Which will still probably be pretty long. *wink*

Anyway, after slacking off for most of the day yesterday, my cousins Melanie and Marian met up at my house and we headed over to hit the bars on Division. I was going to be the designated driver, but then Dan agreed to come and drive us around. Which made me a happy girl, because that meant that all of us could drink without worrying about who was driving home.

I don't usually go to the Division bars, but every once in a while it's a nice change of pace. When we got there, there wasn't much parking left, so we went further down the street and found a nice spot. I looked at the sign right next to where I had parked, and it said 'No Parking'. I told Dan about it, but then he corrected me - the fine print said 'Between 6am and 9am'. Oh. OK. And underneath it was the standard 'No Parking if there's more than two inches of snow between 3am and 7am.' Or something like that.

So we went to our first place (we were planning on hitting most of the bars there) and had a couple drinks, watched people sing karaoke, and played a couple games of pool (which my team consistently won, even though I played like crap for the first half). The main object for the night was to get my cousin Marian to meet some men. She's been single for a bit, and she just wanted to have some fun. The first place was a bit dry of any good prospects, so we headed to the place next door.

This place was definitely more lively than the first, with girls dancing on poles and a sausage fest near the bar. We stayed here for the rest of the night, drinking, dancing, and for Marian, meeting a ton of cute guys and talking and dancing with them. The girl was a magnet, and I was quite proud of her abilities. She was on fire! The music was great, so I got some good dancing in. There was one guy that tried hitting on me, but I flashed him the ring, and he got all sad, so I had a talk with him about how to pick up a girl, because he came on way too strong. It was a nice conversation, and my little pep talk gave him the courage to go and hit on 30 other girls. OK. He would have done it without my pep talk.

So we had a great time. A lot of good laughs. We were ready to go home at around 4am. We left the bar a bit tipsy, and Dan was our pimp. We started walking back towards the car, and there was a point where Dan and Claudine were standing on the sidewalk. I looked next to where they were standing and didn't see any cars. Dan looked really confused, and he was reading the parking signs. "Fuck!" he shouted. "Don't tell me we've been towed!" I said. But indeed we had. After closer inspection, the parking sign said that if there was 2 inches of snow OR between the hours of 3am and 7am there was no parking, not the combination of the two! We seemed to have missed the 'OR' part of the whole thing.

So we asked the cop that was patrolling the street where they towed the cars to. He gave us an address and we all piled into a cab and went to the impound lot, which was on Lower Wacker, a creepy, scary place at night.

When we got there, the guy told us my car wasn't there, but was actually somewhere on the south side. So once again, we piled into a cab and went there (after going to the ATM to get the wad of cash needed to get our car out). And there were quite a few people at this lot. We waited in line for eons and more people piled in, most who had gotten their cars towed because of the snow parking signs. It was like 'Club Impound' in there...all we needed was a DJ and some strobe lights. But I guess this has been a problem for a lot of people.

Finally, we got our car back, and when we got home, at around 5:30am, we were completely exhausted, too tired to make our much anticipated White Castle run.

So the lesson here, kids, is always read those signs, even though you see them every day, make sure to read the fine print!

Posted by Yano at December 28, 2003 10:05 PM

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