Adventures at Washington National Airport

So I've had my new Prius three days and haven't taken it anywhere. I have a trip out of National, departing at 7:00 PM, which means I'm pretty much going reverse flow against the rush hour traffic. The car drives like a dream, and I'm enjoying pushing all the buttons. I park in the crew lot, which is at the south end of the runway by the water, hop on the crew bus, and start my trip. So far, so good. Two days later, I'm back at the crew lot, looking for my car, which is nowhere to be found. Bloody hell. Who steals a Prius? I walk up and down the lot, pressing the panic button, just to make sure I haven't gone brain dead and parked it somewhere else. Nope. It's gone. So I flag down an MWAA car who is patroling the lot. He takes down my information. Just to be sure, he checks the impound lot to see if it was towed. No, it hasn't been logged into the lot. He tells me my car has been stolen. I ask my wife to call the dealership to get the number for Toyota roadside assistance. When I registered for the Safety Link, I was told they could locate a stolen car but they never sent me the email with all the info about the system that they promised they would. The salesman who sold us the car was totally clueless about roadside assistance and said the safety link was only used in the event of an accident. He finally gave a number to my wife, which turned out to be for some online gambling site. So I'm forced to take the train home to F'Burg, thinking about all the hassles I'm going to have to go through.

I get home and use that thing called Google to get the right phone number, and am just about to call Toyota when the police call me back with good news. They've found my car. It's in the impound lot after all. I'm relieved they've found my car but wth was it towed? The next day I have to drive back up to the airport and go to the police sub-station in Terminal B. It's located behind Dunkin Donuts. I am not making this up. While my patient wife waits in the cell phone lot, I begin to jump through the endless hoops to reclaim my car. First of all, I'm asked to produce proof that it's my car. Well sure, I'd show you the registration, but it's in the glove compartment and you towed my car. Now I have to walk over to the impound office, which is on the ground floor of the parking garage opposite the B/C terminals. Then they have to drive me over to the impound lot so I can retrieve the registration. And that's when I see that my crew tag isn't on the rear view mirror. It's on the dash board. So because it wasn't hanging from the mirror, my car was towed. But wait, there's more. I walk back to the police office and they still won't release my car. The license plate on the car keeps coming up to my old car--the one I traded in when I bought the Prius. I cannot convince Barney Fife that transferring plates from car to another is a common practice during a trade-in. He wants to see all of the paper work involved in the sale and I ask him who in the hell carries that around with them? Finally, a more senior officer gets involved and points out to the first officer that dealers in Virginia have 30 days to process the paperwork. So they give me the paperwork to retrieve my car . . . oh, and two tickets. One for parking illegally in the crew lot (even though I'm authorized to park there) and another for illegal registration (even though the car is legally registered.) I'm about to go postal and the corporal I'm talking to says he can't do anything about the bogus tickets. I have to go talk to the sergeant. The sergeant's office is in the basement of Terminal A, so now I hoof it over there. The sergeant says he can tear up the illegal parking ticket if I can show him my parking tag, which of course, is in the car. He can't do anything about the illlegal registration ticket. I'll have to talk to the corporal who wrote the ticket, who of course, works the graveyard shift, so I'll have to come back after MIDNIGHT . . . and BTW, he's off for the next five days. The sergeant says he'll be there until 3:30, so I can stop back by and show him my hang tag, and he'll take care of that ticket.

Now I make the long march back to the impound office, where I have to pay $175 to get my car back. This day just gets better and better. And they don't take plastic at this place--cash only. So I have walk back into the terminal yet again to find an ATM. That done, I'm finally reunited with my car. It's now 2:30 and I call the sergeant to say I'll be right over . . . and am told he's gone home for the day and won't be back for five days. Nobody else can handle my problem. What a great time. I still haven't gotten the tickets resolved, I'm out $175, and six wasted hours, but at least I have my Prius back--a sort of happy ending. I don't know how the MWAA are on solving crimes but they're hell on suspected illegal parking.

 

Yep, I admit that it's my fault that I didn't put the hang tag on the rearview. The crew desk called me just as I was pulling into the spot, because they were asking me if I could take an earlier flight because of a crew shortage. I'll blame it on them for distracting me. The sergeant I spoke with said it's standard procedure for them to look inside the car if they don't see a tag. According to him, it happens all the time and is no big deal. For some reason the officer who got me didn't see it. It's just a guess, but I'm thinking when he didn't see my hang tag, he ran the plates, which came up to the car which I'd just traded infor my new Prius. So he then called the tow truck and never looked inside my car. It was 2:30 in the morning. Once before, on a trip from National I realized I'd forgotten to put up the hang tag. I called the MWAA police and they told me not to worry about it. I also used to keep a car cover on my BMW and was never bothered about it. I will say that the post on a Prius 4 rearview is thicker than average, which causes my hang tag to be at about a 45 degree angle anyway, and hard to see from behind the car. Maybe I'll get a "Don't Tow Me, Bro" bumper sticker.

Humble? A fighter pilot? Hmmm.

 

I didn't intend to make this seem like an anti-police rant, just relating the comedy of bureaucratic errors involving my new Prius. I drove up to DCA today, spoke to a senior sergeant, and he said he'd take care of my tickets. Most of the MWAA police officers are good guys and often take the time to shoot the breeze with me, because one of my bro-in-laws is a police officer.