Epic Internet Drama/Ownage In Progress

[bill1975]

Hi Guys - I am not a regular nsxprime user, nor do I have an NSX, I'm really a VW guy. But, I was tuned in to your forum when the great Nsx_Nick/Nick Sitko owning went down (which Im surprised to see hasn't been locked yet). That was possibly the greatest thing I have ever read on the internet. You guys are geniuses!

Anyway, since the rest of the internet pretty much hogged your bandwidth please feel free to stop by vwvortex, or its sub-forum, the car lounge. Think of it as a thanks for the great entertainment you provided for the rest of us. (I searched here so I don't think this has been posted here yet)

So my Audi got booted, and this is what I'm going to do about it....discuss

The summary of the story:

Guy in AZ is part of a Home Owners Association, with strict parking rules requiring a parking tag, enacted long after he moved in. Guy forgets on ONE occasion to put up the parking tag on his Audi.

Contracted parking enforcement company boots the car, even though they know the guy is a resident and has a tag. Guy puts dollies underneath his booted car to move it into his garage (and uses a different car in the mean time), severely pissing off Arizona Parking Solutions (APS). APS threatens to take him to court, claim he is stealing the boots, and threaten him some more.

Cops get involved, and side with the car owner, saying he isn't breaking any laws. and tells APS to take their boots off the guys car and GTFO. APS rants and raves, owner of said company is on the verge of physically assaulting car owner.

Home Owners Assoc (HOA) gets involved, and appears to be siding with car owner, and apparently it is discovered APS is breaking its own rules. APS also decides to go out and boot multiple cars for no apparent reason, in retaliation.

Hilarity has been ensuing for about 40 pages now. The screen name of the main character/car owner/bootee is The A1 and A2 German. If you want, just scroll through for his posts for the updates and pictures. If you haven't read this a;ready and have some extra time, enjoy! Photo-chops will begin soon....


NSX Content - Isnt there an NSX in Pulp Fiction? The guy that figures out how to dispose of the dead body that's in some dude's garage? I thought of this site when I saw that.

 

[flaminio]

NSX Content - Isnt there an NSX in Pulp Fiction? The guy that figures out how to dispose of the dead body that's in some dude's garage? I thought of this site when I saw that.

Yes, that's Mr Wolf's car. Very famous 'round here.

Great story! Towing companies are scum of the earth. I almost had my NSX towed once. I was dropping my kid off at a friend's house for a sleepover, and it was one of those communities with *zero* visitor parking and aggressive towing policies. As I was just walking my girl to the door I didn't think it'd be a problem, but when I got back to the car a tow truck had already stationed itself in front of my car and was preparing to haul it away. He already had one hook on it, and wouldn't let me touch it, and charged me eighty frakkin' dollars to take it off. Call the cops, you say? The cops are in on it -- there was a cop there, and he acted like he was doing me a favor by not writing me a ticket on top of the tow charge. Miserable bastidges, the lot of 'em.

 

[chado]

How bout this one...

I went home yesterday during lunch to swap cars and let the GF borrow my daily driver. I live in a townhome where like most the garages all face out to the street behind the units. You are not allowed to park behind your own garage due to fire code (some code) we have been told by the HOA.

Well yesterday when I went home I wanted to wipe off the windshield for the GF and was simply going to swap cars quickly. For this reason I parked it behind my garage, however I angled it so that the driver front fender was actually in my garage and also I had left all the windows down. Well needless to say I was right inside the door out to the garage talking to my GF for a few minutes when I hear the sound of metal rattling around and it seemed as if it was inside my garage...!! So I open the door to the garage to see a tow truck driver already pulled up behind my car and is attempting to put the rollers on the FWD accord!!!! Mind you he's on MY PROPERTY to do this!



I couldn't believe it and yelled out what the f*** are you doing get the f*** away from my car now! It was funny because I really caught him off guard and he was extremely nervous. He gave me some bs response about parking in front of the garages and that "he really didn't want to tow me, thats why he waited for 15 minutes"... I said to him wtf you can hear me right inside the garage door talking why wouldn't you tell me to move it (as if there was a need to).
I told him that it was just really f'd up you were trying to make a quick buck at someone elses expense and he said "well look at the economy, who isn't" !!! WTF
I almost escalated things but knowing where I lived and what I drove (NSX in plain view as he was in my damn garage) I didn't want to worry about some POS messing with me or my things.
I did notify him that he better think twice before trying something like this again especially in another neighborhood.. had it been a few years ago he would have really regreted what he had tried to do. I know he was thinking I was just probably some older "rich" guy who wouldn't fight him and just pay the towing charge....

FYI I pay almost $400.00 per month in HOA fees!!!

 

[Jim]

There is a company (I forgot the name) that sells boots to public consumers. The owner (or rep?) of this company was being interviewed on the radio recently. He says people can buy these boots to put on their cars to prevent get booted! I think he said they were $200 a piece. Who would do this?

 

[JonBoy]

Good stuff!

 

[Paul]

Great read! Thanks for the link and summary.

 

[Sarge]

pay a locksmith 20 bucks to remove the boot for you,
keep the boots.

Drive up to the house of the president of the homeowner's association and put the boot on his car.


I like this Idea from their forums. Plus I think its against the law to F_ _ K with a handicapped persons car. If this ever happens to me, god help them! I have nothing but time to jerk these people into court. Every minute im standing will be considered pain and suffering.

 

[Sarge]

just in case!

How We Beat the Boot

Reprinted without permission from the Thistle, December 8, 1993 [who got
it from some unidentified San Francisco alternative paper]

Parking boots are public property.

The parking-control officers who attach them to your wheels intend for
them to stay there until you've paid off your fines. Removing the boot
without authorization, or damaging it in any way, is a crime.

Nevertheless, in cities like Denver and Boston, where the boot has been
a part of life for years, the contraptions occasionally disappear. In
some cities, more than 10 percent of the boot stock has vanished or been
rendered inoperable.

That came as no surprise to the mechanical experts who examined our
boot. The boot, they say, is nowhere near as tough as it looks. Anyone
with less than $30 worth of basic hand tools and enough dexterity to
screw in a light bulb can probably break the boot's grip on a car wheel
in about ten minutes.

The boot is designed to intimidate, our experts say; its toughest parts
are the ones that would be the most obvious targets for boot-busting
vandals -- the lock mechanism, for example. With a special
tamper-resistant padlock surrounded by a box made of quarter-inch carbon
steel plates, the lock will stand up to just about anything short of a
low-yield nuclear device. So our bootbusters ignored the lock and
looked for other less-obvious places where the boot could be attacked.
It took them no time to discover several major weak points in the boot's
protective armor.

Deflating the tire.

If the boot is going to work properly, it must be properly installed,
and that's not an easy process -- especially in the dark, when you have
a long night of boot-installing ahead. If the installation is even a bit
sloppy (that is, if the jaws that attach the boot to the wheel are a
little bit loose), it's often possible to remove the boot by letting the
air out of the tire and simply sliding the whole thing off.

This is by far the simplest strategy. It doesn't always work --
conscientious installer can prevent it almost every time, and some car
wheels don't leave enough room for the process anyway. But veterans of
boot-happy cities have told us they've removed dozens of boots this way,
quickly, quietly, and easily.

The hubcap plate.

A key element to the boot's effectiveness is its ability to prevent
car-owners from getting access to the lug nuts on the booted wheel. Once
the lug nuts are accessible, the wheel can be removed and replaced with
a spare tire, and the car can be driven away.

If the boot is properly installed, the plate will be tightly secured
over the hubcaps, making it impossible event to imagine loosening the
lug nuts. But the plate is one of the more flimsy parts of the boot;
it's attached by a half-inch swivel pin that is spot-welded to the
frame. As our boot-busting experts explained, spot welds that hold
together two pieces of metal of different thicknesses are inherently
weak. There are several such welds on the boot, and this one is
especially vulnerable.

With a common battery-powered drill and a 15-cent grinding wheel or
"cut-off tool", one of our experts was able to grind away most of the
weld on the pin in about two minutes. With a five-dollar cold chisel and
a standard hammer, he did the same job even faster.

Once the weld is broken, a quick blow with a hammer forced the pin out,
releasing the plate from the boot frame and making it easy to change the
tire and drive away, leaving the old, boot-laden tire behind (or safely
stowed in the trunk as a souvenir).

The jaw-to-frame pins.

The main frame of the boot -- the "arm" -- fit into a pair of metal pins
on the wheel-clamp, or "jaw". The pins are a central element of the
boot's structure. They're also one of its weakest links.

The pins are only about an inch long. when the boot is installed, they
appear to be connected to each other through some sort of thick, central
rod. In fact, they're just stuck into holes drilled in the frame, and
spot-welded at the bottom.

Even when the boot is assembled, there's plenty of free play between the
arm and the pins. A few strong, sharp blows with a hammer on the top of
the pins quickly breaks them free and makes them easy to remove. With
those pins gone, the boot comes apart immediately.

The welds holding the lock-box to the frame. For all the effort that the
bootmakers put into developing an impregnable locking mechanism, it's
amazing how loosely the lock-box is attached to the rest of the boot.
Four flimsy spot-welds hold the entire padlock-and-cover-plate assembly
to the main boot frame. It took an expert just a few seconds to chip
away one of the welds with a chisel and hammer; when one of our spastic,
incompetent, weak-wristed editors tried it on a second weld a few days
later, it took less than a minute.

Once the lock-box is liberated from the frame, the entire boot can be
dismantled and removed quickly with a ratchet and standard (16-inch)
spark-plug socket.

The arm itself.

If all else fails, our experts discovered that they could actually cut
through the tough-looking steel of the main arm with a battery-powered
drill and a cut-off tool. forget the oxyacetylene torches and the nitric
acid -- the boot arm cuts like butter with a cheap hobbyist's tool. By
our calculations, a standard drill-and-cut-off tool set-up can cut
through the main arm in less than ten minutes.

The padlock keys.

When the parking-control officers come to remove a boot, the first thing
they have to do is unlock the padlock. Since the city is buying about
100 of the monsters, it seems highly unlikely that every boot will have
a different key. In other cities, like Denver, a single master key
unlocks them all.

That means, of course, that an anarchist thug with a penchant for
trouble-making (or a wily hustler with an eye for a quick profit) could
easily dismantle and remove the boot from some poor innocent scofflaw's
illegally parked car, take the thing home, bust the lock off and pay a
less-than-scrupulous locksmith to make up a new key -- a key that would
instantly unlock every boot in the city.

Of course, the city can always change all the padlocks on a regular
basis (although they don't come cheap). But if we know this city, the
pirates will soon be making and selling the keys faster than the cops
can replace the locks, forcing the taxpayers to pour ever-increasing
sums of money into a parking-law-enforcement mechanism that is neither
appropriate nor effective for San Francisco.

 

[fullracehonda]

dam, i just went to every dam page, like 54 or so i forget.




i LOL'd so many times, that pool companys truck that was at the housing complex doing work and they got booted OMG WTF BBQ LOL, im curious as to why nobody in that complex shot the owner of the parking company, i wish i could have posted but i forgot my vwvortex password, i guess that happens when you dont in for 3 years, stupid vdubs:tongue:

 

[bill1975]

haha thanks guys! stay tuned...

 

[Cairo94507]

I was a cop in my former career and every opportunity I had to book a tow truck driver or parking enforcement officer I did. They (generally) are the scum of the earth and absolute criminals. They steal cars and extort money from the owner to give their car back. It is criminal that they are permitted to do this crap. The meter maids (aka black widows) are just as bad. I have seen them hang tickets on cars that are not yet violating the law, but they anticipate they will violate (street cleaning zones, etc.) by not moving before the designated time.
Most of the tow truck drivers I booked were carrying weapons without a permit. Some were high on drugs, holding drugs, etc. Real scum of the earth.

 

[heySkippy]

That's a fun read. I hate HOAs with the fire of a thousand suns.

 

[1SICKLEX]

Truly an Epic thread!

 

[Mirroredshades]

This cracks me up.

:biggrin: