Last night I was in the police station getting data for the police logs. As I sat there in the lobby perusing the logs, some girl came in and approached the dispatch desk.

“Hi, I don’t know what to do… This has never happened before. I think my car was towed.”

A few minutes go by, and the dispatcher concludes, “Ma’am, we didn’t tow your car.”

She told him exactly where she’d parked, so he pulled it up on the camera and zoomed in. (The zoom on those cameras is ridiculous!) “I was right next to that Jeep,” she said. Sure enough, her car wasn’t there.

She called to get information on activating Lo-jack in her car.  The dispatcher called local tow yards to confirm that no one had towed the car without telling him. One  by one, they came back negative.

I was sitting there, intrigued. Part of me didn’t believe that a car had just been stolen on campus. But the other part of me was irritated that the dispatcher was was lallygagging around instead of putting out a BOLO for the recently-stolen car.

Finally, he radioed to one of the officers who was patrolling the parking lot, and asked him to look for the car. About ten seconds later, he radioed back. “I’m sitting right in front of it.” He turned on his lights so they could see where he was on camera.

He was maybe four cars down from where she said she’d parked.

I tried to refrain from cracking up. And as I soon realized that it’s exactly what everyone else in the station was trying to do.

(As an added bonus, she freely admitted that she was illegally parked in a handicapped spot and had no parking permit, although they seemed to distracted with the hunt for her lost car to issue her a citation.)