The day started out bad. One of the worst days I had had in a long time, in fact. I was ready to head to work, but my car didn’t seem to be where I had left it. In fact, it wasn’t in the parking lot. At all. Anywhere. I realized that I had been towed, and it was all my fault.
I had lived in the Arlington apartment for 3 months, but had never bothered to put the parking sticker in my window. I knew that I needed to, that I risked the chance of being towed, but I had forgotten for the first few weeks, then the sticker disappeared in a pile of mail and old papers. So I had just never done it.
I didn’t know the towing company the complex used, so I had to wait till they opened so I could call and find out. My roommate was surprised to see me still home at 7:30, and I managed to growl a good morning. Sensing my mood, she let me be till I could figure out where my car was.
At 8, I called the apartment office, and got the name and number of the towing company. Then I called the towing company to find out where they were located, and found that they were in Springfield. Directly the opposite direction of work. They informed me it would be $72 to get my car back. And they only took cash. I called a cab to pick me up at my apartment, then realized that I didn’t have much cash on hand. So with no car, and no cash, I walked to the Safeway down the street to hit up their ATM. And then with no car, but some cash, I walked back to my apartment building to await my ride.
A $25 cab ride later, I was at the towing grounds. Trading $72 for my parking-sticker-free car. After getting directions to Herndon – turns out there’s a road that goes right from Springfield to Herndon, a rare occurrence in the Northern Virginia area – I was finally on my way to work.
I was frustrated, almost to the point of tears. I had just paid $100 for the privilege of driving my own stupid car. And I was going to be late for work. I was having the worst day ever. I was already formulating the story I was going to tell my coworkers when I finally made it in to work.
I was listening to one of my radio stations, when they stopped playing music. Not one for talking-on-the-radio-in-the-morning-especially-when-I’m-having-a-bad-day, I started cycling through all my stations, trying to find a song I liked. But they had all gone to talk at the same time, like they often seem to do. Just before I switched over to a cd, I caught some of the talk – something about planes in New York, hitting the World Trade Center towers. They didn’t seem to know much, there were people calling in saying all kinds of things. It was so completely unreal, I bounced around from DJ to DJ, trying to get the news. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, but one thing was clear: it was bad. Very, very bad.
I got to work just in time to watch the towers collapse on CNN. We were all gathered around the tv, trying to make sense of everything, the towers collapsing, the bomb or plane at the Pentagon, there seemed to be reports of both. There were reports of other planes headed to other places, of bombs going off in various government buildings in DC, it was all a chaotic mess.
And so we were sent home. I made my way back home, to Arlington, half a mile from the defaced Pentagon. I realized what a truly horrible day it had become. And I realized that in comparison, I was having a GREAT day after all.