Car Lots – fizzle fizzle

So, all within a 4-day period two of the longest standing used car lots in my hood are gone.
Not gone as in razed, the buildings both still stand, the offices not cleared, but the cars disappeared. When I say disappeared, I mean gone in a matter of hours - last night about 9 p.m. Jen and I are sitting in our front room and keep hearing, beep beep, beep (back-up alarms) and see repeated yellow lights circling on our walls and ceiling. We remove ourselves from the black box, peer outside, and view about two dozen flat beds, tow trucks and various sketchy individuals moving the high-dollar cars around like toys at the Thompson & Ward Leasing Car lot. We watched for a bit from the front sidewalk, thinking any minute we would see a cop pull up or something.

I grab the bull by the horns, walk over there and stand a few feet from a very large guy that looks as he should have his own Repo show on TLC and standing next to him was a man in a $1000 + suit.
The Repo man leans over and says something to the Suit – they are aware I am there.

I leave; call the policeman, just in case. Twenty minutes later, a cop car rolls by, rolls the window down and leaves. Hmmmmm. Well, I guess they ARE supposed to be towing every single, Audi, Mercedes, BMW and the like out of the building and lot.
I can say, watching them was crazy; they moved these cars around fast and took what they wanted. Being the CSI investigator semi-smart person I am, there were no car alarms, no building alarms, that should have triggered (no pun intended-but funny) my brain someone permitted them to hitch these cars.

Someone up the money chain at Enron, AIG, Fannie Mae, “Bob’s Bank” and these two car lots over the last 5 years all made a wrong decision. Snap – 10 to hundreds are out of jobs. Can you say overcompensated executive salary; or Economic Terrorists? I put this in the same category as the gas speculators driving the cost of a barrel of fuel – they start being ‘investigated’ and the price drops.

The bail out goes through and the top tier at AIG is out spending $23,000 worth on spa treatments at a fancy resort for executives when bankruptcy is looming. AIG, spent $440,000 on a retreat for its executives while it tapped into an $85 billion bankruptcy bailout loan from the federal government.
This all became known this week at a Congressional hearing revealing these findings during an investigation into AIG’s “meltdown.” Rep. Henry Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, CA.

All scary, not in a haunted house manner, but that in a matter of hours people’s lives are changed forever. Easily all 25 plus cars there, all gone in less than two hours – boom-bam - I hope no one wanted to buy or look at a car today. Ha.

Fast forward to this morning. I drive down my street, witness a familiar employee vehicle from Thompson & Ward, (that always parks on our street). I see the driver roll into the parking lot, very very slowly; the driver drives back through their small leasing office into the alley and back out onto our street. I cross over the main drag, roll my window down and catch his attention. He rolls his window down with a look of fright on his face, I say, “do you work there?” He replies “yes,” I tell him, “the tow trucks were here last night for about two hours,” he replies, “hmmmm, I am not surprised.” I also mentioned I called the blue and white; he said, “Well that probably was not necessary.”

I have not figured out why this bothers me so much. I suppose watching it all happen. It was right in my neighborhood and hits too close to home. The fact that I am blogging about the incident.

The man can just come take your shit.

Who had keys to the cars, who had the key to the building? Did the employees know, were they there? Was it the bank? Did the business miss a payment or a dozen payments? Had the business been struggling? Does the bank own the property and the cars; therefore, they had keys to the cars and property?

Ok I am finished -
Maybe in a few days, I will have some perspective. I am off to race my bike.
Now, get out of my yard you dang kids.