So, today I'm taking the dog for a walk & ... Wait, I think I parked there. Where the **** is my car? Circle back around to investigate and sure enough there's a sign showing me the error of my ways.]
Hard to see how I possibly could have missed it seeing as it was clearly placed about 2 feet above where the branches of this tree hang.
So, I'm out there documenting the scene & reading up on the local ordinances because I fully intend to pay this impound fee and then take someone to small claims court for this bull****. I also figure out where my car has been towed.
350 Lower East Wacker Drive. Go ahead and Google Maps that ****. There's **** all there. So, I take the L train out there to see what I can see because all I can do is get this automated system to tell me where it's been towed, the luxury of actually speakimg to a living human has long since passed. I walk around Upper Wacker. Nothing. Last building is 345 E. So, I ask the valet at a hotel there and he tells me to go down a level. There's **** all there either. Just a bunch of parking garage entrances and exits. Oh yeah, also a LOT of homeless people and inexplicable drainage. So, there's one more level down. On the north side is the river walk with cafés, boat tours and equipment rentals and on the south side a dystopian scene that conjure Robocop or Batman scenes. I walk west along the river walk because I assume this place must be on the north side of Wacker because 345 was on the south side. Also, self preservation.
Google is telling me I've passed it. I delve back into the dripping concrete heart of Chicago. Sewage. Semi-trucks. Vents coming from God knows where blast me with bouts of disgusting warm and humid air. This cannot possibly be the place. There's no barely any sidewalks and the ones that are there are covered in makeshift homeless nests. I push onward. A sign ahead "Chicago Impound Lot: 400 E Wacker"
The hell? Why'd they direct me to 350 E Wacker? Regardless at this point I've been walking nearly 45 minutes when Google had told me the destination would be only 12 minutes walk from my stop so I am happy.
I'm directed by an officer once inside the impound lot to a mobile trailer where I meet a friendly African American woman who cannot in spite of herself find any record of my car. "Are you sure it's here?" "Of course, the app told me." "What's the license plate # again let me check some other facilities." "Let me read you exactly what the app said."
"Oh, 350 E Wacker.That's not here, that's down the street. Sometimes they'll put a car there. You got lucky tho, if they'd have brought it here it would have been. $175 to get it out." Then she took me out front and pointed down the road, "You see where that utility truck is? Should be right near there."
Sure enough it was. Parked with a half dozen other cars some badly damaged from accidents. Just set up on the median between east and west bound traffic. I got in and drove it off the curb and home.
I know the reason they didn't impound is because they knew they'd ****ed up the signage/notification that they're required to give. So, they just dumped it in the bowels of Chicago so they could do their work anyway. On the plus side no vagrants vandalized or shat in my car so I got that going for me.