Saturday, March 1, 2008

Car troubles

I woke up to a bit of a start today. I heard someone knocking on our front door. I couldn't figure out who it would be at about 8 am on a Saturday morning. I wondered if it really was our door. I ignored it until it got louder and louder. I put on my robe and peeked out my peep hole. I didn't recognize the man and it made me nervous so I crept away. For some reason I am always afraid to let strange men (usually delivery or maintenance guys) know I am home. Then he started calling my name and I realized it was one of Abe's friends. I was then worried that something had happened to Abe.

Turns out Abe got pulled over for having foggy windows. His defrost does not work very well and we had just dug his car out from a long and snowy winter vacation last night. Maybe we should have left it because Abe could not find his updated insurance card. He had an expired one still under his parents' name. The officer was nice enough to call the insurance company but not nice enough to listen to Abe about why the insurance company said they were unable to find him or his car. They must have not looked for him separately from his parents and the officer treated him like a criminal and wouldn't believe his story, that he had recently married and traded over his insurance to his own name and could you please check under his name ("yes, I already did and you aren't understanding that the insurance company would know and they say you don't have any insurance.")

To make a long story short, Abe got a $400 ticket and his car was impounded. What a great start to the morning! Abe's friend was in the neighborhood (they were on their way to play basketball together) and dropped by to see if he could get the cards before the car was towed.

I know you are supposed to always keep the proof of insurance in the car and I also know the officer technically did nothing wrong. The insurance company also may not have done anything wrong. But it is frustrating that we made a simple mistake (we thought we had been very careful about putting in our new cards but we had missed his car somehow), the insurance company made a mistake in not thoroughly looking in their system for our information, and the officer should have been a little more reasonable in listening. We live in a very small community with very low crime. I don't understand why he wouldn't take the demographics of the area into a little more consideration before jumping the gun. Needless to say when a few hours later Abe presented the card to him he felt very bad.

We still have to go to court and pay the $50 fee as well as the towing. We also may be switching insurance providers. We joked that maybe we need to go to AllState because State Farm definately didn't have us in their hands today.

4 comments:

Jessica Sorensen said...

That stinks. I better make sure we have current insurance cards in our cars.

brenna said...

I'm glad he felt bad when you showed him. Those dang cops, doing their job! (Just kidding, i'm glad he didn't arrest abe, although that would make for an interesting blog post...)

Amber said...

Cops are the worst! ;)
Sorry about the drama. I agree that officers shouldn't always jump the gun and assume ill intent. Listening skills can go a long way sometimes. But I guess not listening/believing is a safer way to avoid manipulation, which can be life or death to an officer.

Erin said...

Yeah, I know he was doing his job and I can see where he is coming from. But it is frustrating when you get caught in the middle and really do have a legitimate excuse. Five minutes of listening wouldn't have hurt him and would have saved him time in the long run as well as our pocketbook!