There’s a car wash place near my house called Sparkling Touch. It’s one of those places where you get out of your car and they drive it through the automated car-wash alley, then a bunch of men wipe the car down with sopping wet towels at the end and spray some vaguely fruit-smelling mist on your carpet. Pretty typical stuff.

Out front, though, they have a large sign that features the name of the place and then a customizable message area, one of those white ones with the horizontal slats and the big, plastic black letters. You see them all the time. The thing about those type of signs is, the letters can fairly easily slide around a little, left to right. So it is with this sign. The message they put up to entice passers-by to stop in was “Enjoy the Sparkling Touch of full service.” But either through happenstance or hooligans, the letters have shifted and now say “E njoy the Sp arkli ng Touch offull service.”

I don’t normally enjoy awful service, or worse, offal service, I don’t care how much it sparkles.

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The parking at my apartment complex is a joke. There’s nowhere near enough spots, which means people wind up parking anywhere they can. We get people double-parking, blocking other cars in, which is always fun come Monday morning and you need to go to work. Every weekend, someone ends up parallel parking in front of the fire hydrant. On multiple occasions, someone (and I dearly hope there’s a special room in Hell reserved for these asshats) has parked in the blue-slashed area next to the handicapped space that’s there so the handicapped drivers can get their wheelchairs out.

Now, the fiancée and I follow the rules and only park in designated areas. She doesn’t have as much trouble as I do since she works from home and can usually land a spot when she comes back from running errands in the afternoons. And she’s courteous enough not to take one of the two coveted spots right next to the front entrance, contenting herself with one of the just-decent spots off to the side. So we were both surprised one Saturday night to come home and find a tow warning on her car.

She was legally parked in a designated space. Her license plates were up to date. She wasn’t breaking any rules or laws, but they were threatening to tow her car in 24 hours. And they put this warning on at 8:00 on a Saturday night. What are the odds that we would see it before 8:00 on Sunday? If we hadn’t gone out on the spur of the moment to get a late snack, we never would have seen the notice.

So we look at the tag to see what grievous error she had committed. The warning stated that the car “had not been moved in several weeks.” Well, that was blatantly not true. She’d just driven it the day before. And again two days before that. Something was wrong here. So I tore the warning off (it left a nasty glue residue that took forty minutes of cleaning to remove completely), planning to take it to the office next morning to find out what the deal was.

Sunday morning I popped over and grabbed one of the office drones. Here’s how the conversation went:
“What is this?”
“That’s a parking violation notice.”
“… Yeah, I can read, so I actually kinda knew that part. What I’m asking is, why was this put on my fiancée’s car?”
“Let’s see… It says it hasn’t been moved in several weeks.”
“Again, I can read. Tell you what. Let’s just assume that I’ve read and understood everything written on here. What I don’t understand–and this is what I want you to help me with–is what makes you think the car hasn’t moved in several weeks?”
“We got a call that it hadn’t.”
“But it has. She’s driven it three times this week.”
“Well, we got a call that said it hadn’t.”
“That’s it? One person makes a phone call, you take them at their word, do no further investigation, and this is the response? Instant tow?”
“Oh, we weren’t going to tow your car.”
I point to the tag. “Says right here you’re going to tow it in 24 hours.”
“Oh, no. This is just a courtesy notice.”
I point again. “It says ‘warning’ in four-inch-tall red letters. That’s not very courteous.”
“Well, this is just to let you know that there’s a problem.”
“What problem? The car is legally parked, in working condition, with legal plates. It’s been moved several times this week. We’re not breaking any rules or violating the lease. She works from home and can get a good spot next to the building. She doesn’t even take one of the great spots, which she could. So what’s the problem? What have we done wrong?”
“Well, maybe she shouldn’t park next to the building.”
“Why not? We pay the same amount of rent as everyone else. Why should we have to park farther away just because her situation allows her to get a decent spot?”
“Well, a lot of people live here and we need to keep them all happy.”

So just to clarify: Someone gave the office bad information about my fiancée’s parking and their “courteous” response was to slap a tow warning on her car, at a time when it was unlikely for us to see it in time to do anything about it. Meanwhile, there are people breaking not only the parking rules but the actual law and they receive no punishment, or even threat of punishment. And their answer to keeping everyone happy is to single us out and require us to park at the far end of the lot. That’ll keep us happy, right?

They wound up not towing the car, but it just boggles my mind. They threatened to tow a legally parked car, while ignoring the flagrant parking violations that happen on a near-daily basis. When I mentioned this in our conversation, asking why they didn’t tow the people illegally parked in front of fire hydrants or in no-parking handicapped zones, they told me they didn’t “have the ability to police that sort of thing.” What? You can’t spend five minutes doing a lap around the complex? You’ve got those little golf carts. I’ve seen them. Hop in and take a turn around the lot.

Probably don’t want to lose their parking spot.

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So, I was at Starbucks the other day, as the fiancee wanted a frappucino. I don’t know, she likes ‘em. Anyway, they have a display by the front counter, full of plastic bottles of their Ethos water. On the display is a picture of a grimy child squatting next to a trickle of water running out of a pipe. The display then informs you that over a billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, but you can help! By buying a bottle of Ethos water for only $2.50, Starbucks will then donate five cents of that purchase to helping these poor unfortunate souls get fresh water.

This, to me, seems inefficient. Starbucks is going to have to wait for fifty people to buy a bottle of water before they even have enough to buy the thirsty urchins a single bottle of their own product. And based on the layer of dust on the bottles, the Ethos isn’t exactly flying off the shelves, meaning poor little Ngutu is going to die of thirst long before she gets a sip of the stuff. So here’s what I’m thinking: Starbucks has a bunch of overpriced water they’re not selling. A bunch of people need water. Why not just, oh, I don’t know, send them the bottled water? I mean, if Starbucks is truly, deeply concerned with the welfare of the poor thirsty masses, why not step up and airlift over a couple hundred cases of the stuff? I mean, they must be concerned with the well-being of these poor souls, right? They wouldn’t just be exploiting unfortunate children to guilt us into paying an exorbitant mark-up on tap water, thereby lining their pockets ever deeper in large-denomination bills, would they?

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Seen the ads for the new Gatorade product, G2? They’re billing it as “the low-calorie, off-field hydrator.”

So… water, then?

That’s all it is: flavored water, and all the whiz-bang special effects adding grass under Derek Jeter’s feet aren’t going to change that fact, any more than drinking the stuff is going to make someone into an athlete “even when off the field.”

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The Menards store near my apartment has a large banner out front proclaiming to all: “Live plants for sale!” I guess the dead ones just weren’t moving like they hoped.

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