Monday Memory: Booted

While Jeremy and I were dating, I lived in Campus Plaza, just south of the BYU campus. Jeremy lived in Salt Lake. He would drive down every day after work and we'd go do something fun or just hang out at my apartment. But parking at BYU is a pain, especially around apartment complexes. I think CP had like 2 visitor's spaces, and they were always occupied. Jeremy's Mercury Mystique (aka the Mercury Mistake, but that's another story) got booted no less than 3 different times while we were dating.

One time Jeremy took me grocery shopping late in the evening (I didn't have a car in college until after I got married, so I often relied on roommates to take me grocery shopping, until Jeremy came along). My apartment was right at the top of the stairs, and, it being so late, there was, of course, no parking. So we just stopped the car at the base of the stairs and left it idling while we quickly ran the grocery bags up to the apartment. No sooner had we dropped the bags in the kitchen than we heard the sound of boot chains rattling down below. We ran down the stairs, and sure enough, some dude was booting Jeremy's car. We explained why we had parked there, that it was just to run upstairs really fast, and begged him to take the boot off. He refused, saying he got paid for every boot he placed. After much cajoling, he finally agreed to remove the boot, but we had to pay him 20 bucks directly, as that was his cut (a boot normally cost $40 to remove). I was so mad! It was just some punk kid who was stubborn as an ox. I remembered his name - something Bean. One time he came to the ticket office to buy tickets to some BYU event, and I had to leave the room because I didn't want to look at his face.

Another time that Jeremy got booted was completely embarassing. It was winter and had snowed pretty hard. We had just barely started seeing each other - I don't even think we had kissed or even held hands at this point. I had asked him to bring his mission pictures over because I wanted to see them. My apartment was too crowded, so we went out to his car to look at them. It was snowing hard enough that soon the windows were all covered. We just sat in the car and looked at pictures, completely innocently, and he told me all of the stories that went along with the photos. A while later, there was a knock on the driver's side window. Jeremy opened it and a guy said "Are you aware that there is a boot on your car?" We hadn't noticed it because of the snow. We got out of the car to deal with the situation, and for some bizarre reason there was a crowd of onlookers up on the balcony. Some idiot yelled out "Was she worth it?" Sooooo embarassing!

After we got married, we lived in tiny little complex with LOTS of parking spaces and no parking pass required.