What kind of scam is it that it costs $130 to get my car out of a fenced in parking lot which sat there for less than 12 hours?
The good kind!
P.S. You will kindly address me as 'Emergency Road Service Technician' and in exchange I'll provide you a bit of inside information...
Assuming your vehicle was towed for being parked illegally...
Private towing companies aren't authorized to roam the public streets as rogue parking enforcers. That is a privilege your local municipality reserves for itself alone. Many larger cities have invested huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on Tow Truck fleets, the service facilities needed to maintain them, and vehicle
ransom impound yards. If you see a tow truck bearing either official state seal and "City Tow Services" or markings of the local police dept. you can safely assume all that truck does 24 hours a day is tow vehicles that are illegally parked or have expired registration tags, in addition to administering the police department's constant demand for towing services (seizing private property/impounding evidence).
Cities that lack in-house towing/impound services will indeed sub-contract with private towing companies to provide those services, and this is where your garden-variety 'tow truck drivers' can be found. These will tend to be the same fly-by-night yards and unsavory individuals your finance company will send to repossess your vehicle if you fuck-up on your car payments. Older/obviously improvised tow trucks bearing generic markings ie; "Rick's Towing" or no markings other than the operator's license number all tow trucks under contract or for general hire must display by law, are indicative of this segment of the industry. Those folks are not the same breed as us. FWIW, lifers such as myself view parking enforcement contracts as the shit job it is, and vehicle re-possessors are almost exclusively ex-con former car thieves (I exaggerate not) who have turned their talent for auto theft into a 'legit' enterprise. My company isn't even involved in that sort of work.
We do contract-tow and store for the CHP (including their vehicles), but their impound area is the exclusive domain of wrecks that will never move under their own power again and are just an insurance adjuster's visit away from the car crusher. There's a good chance the title-holders of the vehicles in that yard are just as deceased. Beyond that and a small number of private companies (car dealers)/individuals we service on demand, we're Auto Club contractors all the way.
So if your car ended up in a private yard, it was probably due to the owner of the private property it was parked upon in violation of posted signs ie: "No Parking/Customer Parking Only...Tow-Away", calling the towing company to have it removed. You should consider yourself lucky that the bail fee to release your car was only $150. Municipal rates for straight impound/storage are twice that amount, and those fucks will demand all outstanding reg. fees and parking tickets to be paid in full before they'll release the vehicle.
I concede to being essentially identical to the other mules in my profession, but I do adhere to a personal code of ethics that is all but invisible to the majority of those I serve.
Perhaps there is some greater insight for the OP hiding within this seemingly off-topic reply. I got into towing simply because it was the most immediately accessible means of dealing with the baby I hadn't given adequate consideration to as a possible result of all my carefree partying and getting laid.
My first job was trawling the narrow, parking-prohibited streets of a couple of huge mobile-home parks Any vehicle left unattended on the street in any manner was fair game for me to 'snatch n' grab', a technique that exploits the high maneuverability of small tow trucks equipped with conventional hydraulic wheel lifts (aka: 'stingers') that can rapidly swoop into position, raise a vehicle by it's drive axle and speed off with it. This method can be used to grab any vehicle in less than 60 seconds except SAABs, due to their front-axle parking brakes. SAABs that are parked without the parking brake engaged are of course totally grabbable, but SAABs are favored by passive-aggressive Rush Limbaugh types who get off on parking their un-towable pieces of backwards engineered shit in tow-away zones with the parking brake applied and then lying in wait for the opportunity to vent righteous indignation at tow truck drivers. SAABs can easily be towed using wheel dollies under the front axle, but snatch and grabs technique dispenses with dollies, safety chains, aux brake lights, tire straps, and any other application, safety-oriented or otherwise, that prolongs the process of non-consensual towing. I know it sounds like a towing method that would be highly effective in inflicting damage upon the towed vehicle (because it is), but that's we did it and most likely how it's still being done. Every thief knows how closely related risk-taking is to not being caught in the act.
The worst aspect, ironically, was my salary was commission-based. I fucking hated it, but it kept me in money and out of my own toxicity long enough to develop a better plan of attack than my usual method of walking the fuck away from what I started, which is what I initially planned to do to my son. As I became more proficient, I also became aware that the occupation tended to stroke my INTP-ness in a highly pleasurable manner.
Consider the following...I'm given a vehicle with unique abilities, a remote link to an endless dispatch-stream of problems my vehicle was specifically designed to solve, and spend the entire day (night actually) hopping from encounter to encounter...turning problems into solutions. Ethical purity defines my mission...to aid those who are stranded in the hazardous purgatory of a mechanical breakdown, or to restore traffic flow in the aftermath of car wrecks. Open ended and highly interpretable parameters define my method...prioritize the well-being of your client and his vehicle, in that order, as you deliver them to safety by whatever means necessary. How I combine my tools, ingenuity and experience to accomplish my mission is completely, inalienably, and critically up to me to determine. No two calls are identical, every client is a new face that I will serve once and never again. My task has no margin for error and I must perform it in environments ranging from potentially hazardous to extremely dangerous (I'm statistically more likely to be killed in the line of duty than the CHP officers I frequently assist). My methods are not critiqued by proxy after the fact because it is assumed I will employ logic and common sense for my own self-preservation if nothing else.
Logic and common sense....this is my religion for better or worse. I tow...I worship my gods.
Additionally, I need not promote my services, organization, nor maintain any sort of superior facade to stay ahead of my competition. I have no competition, and I'm providing the client with services their membership dues have already paid for. I render aid that doesn't involve a financial transaction. The lone exception is when the client makes a free-will decision to offer me a tip, which is not expected, encouraged, nor entrenched in reflexive traditionalism as an empty gesture. I always graciously accept these offerings with unwavering awareness of having
earned them. Many of my clients are the type of folks for whom being stranded alone in a broken car on the side of the road in the dead of night is a harrowing experience. Sometimes my most essential skill of all is my ability to deliver people from fear to reassurance...an extraordinarily difficult task to accomplish on the side of the road at 3AM. Many a comrade of mine will lament upon how difficult it can be to keep yourself from becoming an additional source of fear to your client. Most of the tips I receive are attributable to my apparent ability to assume a comforting posture. Perhaps dealing with my kids in this aspect has allowed me to hone this skill...I tend more towards the idea that it's the result of having myself spent so much time alone in the dark on the side of the road. Like it says below my username...distant headlights. Hope speeding inbound to shatter the darkness. That's what I am, and it's as close to my vision of a perfect world as I can ever hope to get from within this irreparably fucked-up one.
All those dirty little secrets...Towing is INTP paradise. Who'd a thunk it through all the intellectualized ether of intipiquity, eh?
I don't know how to play games of higher learning with elitism, though it would have opened many paths of personal interest for me to pursue. Inexplicably, I can find no contentment as a paper professional in a society that worships arrogantly overpriced university degrees so religiously. For me it's not a carefully constructed philosophy...does my grammatical skill betray the fact that I dropped out of school in 9th grade? I feel like my entire childhood was spent being tested on my ability to stay within required parameters of rules, conformity, and traditionalist gestures. Having failed so miserably at those, I can't be anything society needs. My strengths were never relevant...I couldn't acquiesce to systematic academia's demand for temperance. Towing is what I had to fucking work with, so I did the best I could to make it work for ME. I define my occupation...it does not define me...and if I, who have never seen the inside of a high-school, can discover so many layers of contentment lying beneath such a presumptively shallow surface as towing, you, OP, can do the same thing even better.
Towing is freedom-defined for me. If it was anything less I wouldn't be getting paid to do it. Do you understand?
Can I build a wall of text, or what?
