Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Philly Tow Truck Drivers: Kings Among Men


Did you ever read a story online about a group of people in the midst of conflict, and in the comments section there's always that guy who just says to "Nuke them all," or "They should all be killed," or some other dumbass statement used to dismiss an entire group of people? It really bothers me when people do that. It's a display of hatred and xenophobia at its worst, and that attitude has no place in civilized society. If we still have people who think in such broad, ignorant terms, then how are we ever going to move forward as a culture? With that being said, I do believe the following statement is true: All tow truck drivers in Philadelphia should be shot in the face.

Not once in any interaction I've seen or had with a tow truck driver did think the guy was anything other than a flaming asshole. Last year two friends of mine were mistakenly towed from my parking lot and the next morning when we went to go pick them up, we found that one of the cars had a flat tire. When we pointed this out to the tow truck driver who brought the car out, he gave us a grumble of "Let me go talk to my boss" and went inside. We never saw the motherfucker again. We even called the cops, who were very helpful in telling us that we were essentially shit out of luck. It's comforting to know that that every white trash family with a towing company is above the law now.

The one good thing that I can take from this is that since there is no law in the world of towing, the competition between towing companies has now degraded into shooting each other and lighting their competitors' locations on fire. Just this week a driver for J & Son's Towing shot another driver from Mystical Towing over an argument about who got to tow a car from an accident scene. Now it appears that Mystical Towing has taken the logical legal recourse of setting fire to about a dozen cars impounded in J & Son's lot. J & Son's, not wanting to be outdone but wanting to stick with their firearms theme, allegedly shot six rounds into Mystical's building while the owners were in it.

The only people that I feel bad for in all of this are the people who are paying for these companies' "services." You have to think, these are all people who have either been in a car accident or have had some kind of debilitating malfunction in their car. They're going to be late or completely miss whatever they had planned for the day, and it's just a really shitty situation. Now, let's add on to that being witness to a shooting, or finding that your car has a more flame damage or bullet holes than it did before it made it's way into the impound lot.

Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of kind, honest tow truck drivers in the world. But I have yet to see any that work for the city of Philadelphia. I'll give AAA credit for having solid drivers, but according to a caller on the radio yesterday, some of these local companies show up after you call AAA, claim to be on of their drivers, and the next thing you know you've got a bill of several hundred bucks for services that you thought were going to be free. My only hope is that the apparent turf war that has sprung up this week forces Philly to take a closer look at the towing racket in this city, because it seems these guys can just get away with anything and it's really getting nauseating.

1 comment:

  1. bastards...PPA is just as bad too. Its a sad fact about Philly is that the only thing that works well is being towed & ticketed.

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