When I was wandering around the parking lot at Phoenix Sky Harbor Sunday afternoon, I happened to see this license plate:

                                    
Of course, this could stand for "Dakoter Bob" (i.e. Robert from Fargo) but I don't think so :)

I was in the parking garage because I had just gotten back in from a weekend convention in Texas. I gotta tell ya - I do, indeed, love Texans. They are so....Texan! As Mr. Heinlein says, they have a certain "you bought the lunch, I'll buy the Cadillacs" expansiveness.

Texans sound Southern and walk Western - but they don't have the snittiness that we Southerners can exhibit, and they aren't subject to the "leave me alone, I've been alone on horseback for six months" standoffishness that true Westerners display. Texas women, BTW, don't mind being women, at all. Nobody's told them that they are being oppressed with makeup and pretty clothes - they are still Stone-Age enough to think that they LIKE them. And I'm Neanderpuckett enough to appreciate it.

The weekend in Dallas was okay, as long as I didn't go outside - Dallas was a good bit colder than Phoenix (although it's actually just a little further South than Phoenix; that surprised me a bit) and it was also windy - well, there's nothing west of Dallas to stop the wind, is there?...except for Fort Worth, and I don't think that Fort Worthers would be willing to do that for the Dallasians¹; there might be a bit of "new/old" tension between those cities.

Anyway - I got the above picture while wandering around the parking garage after I got off of the plane - as it happens, I was behind getting to the airport (there was some sort of accident on the 60 that caused all of the traffic to spill over onto surface streets) so, at Ethel's direction, I wound up parking in short-term parking, right at Terminal Four (this costs less than new carpet, but a lot more than a really nice dinner) for the three days.

I was in a hurry when I left the car, heading for the gates, but I did stop to write down the parking stall number in my Franklin Planner - "5-242" - level 5, slot 242. I wanted to be sure that, when I got back, I'd be able to find the car, since it's much more difficult to find a car in a multi-level parking garage than it is out in the open.

Of course, you'll notice that I said, above, that I was "wandering around the parking garage", which means that writing the number down didn't work.

Well, there were two problems - actually, no. Just one. I thought that I'd come in at the EAST end of the terminal, so, when I went to look for my car, I went up the East End elevators to level 5 - but I found out, when I got there, that these were the 1000-1500 stalls, and that the 100-500 stalls were at the other end. So I had to walk to the other end, rolling my suitcase behind me. It was while I was doing this long traverse that I found Doctor Bob, above.

Then, when I got to the other end of Level Five, I finally found the 200s...found the 240s....and found 5-242, and there was no car there.

Nothing there. At all. Just an empty parking stall.

Okay, don't panic - let's check the number again in the Franklin - yep. 5-242. I look down at the concrete - 5-242. Franklin - 5-242. Concrete - 5-242. I kept looking back and forth for a while, hoping that one of the numbers would change...

...but they didn't.

Okay - let's look around -0 maybe I transposed some numbers. So I looked around for a while, toting my bag, rolling my suitcase, and scanning left and right for my Beemer, but no luck. It simply was not there at all. Not. There. At. All.

Okay - I call Ethel. "Honey, my car's gone."

Ethel told me not to panic; she said something about me checking all of the levels. I was calm up until this point, but the idea of getting off of a plane after a long convention weekend, and rolling my suitcase back and forth across six levels of parking garage, each about a half-mile long - well, I made unpleasant , whiney noises about that.

So she told me to contact Airport Security. I didn't even want to do THAT - I just wanted to call the police, and then stand there until they came, and ask 'em to gimme a ride home. I was getting a mite tired.

But I did go see Airport Security, and they told me to go BACK up to level 5 and go to the blue box and page Ace Parking, who would come out and drive me all around to look for my car.

Well, that's what I did, and that's what they did, and no car.

But then it occurred to me - what if I hadn't transposed a number? What if I had left one off, instead? I knew that it had to be Level 5, because I remember the sign at the bottom of the ramp saying "First Available Parking - Level 5" - but what if I had, say, left off the 1? I couldn't imagine doing that, but it was more difficult to imagine my Beemer being stolen.

So we rode down to the East end, again, and drove around and found 5-1240, 5-1241....and 5-242. And my car was right there, in 5-242.

Yep. There it was - 5-242, right between 5-1241 and 5-1243.

When I looked, real hard, I could see the 1, but the concrete was corrugated right there, and the 1 was almost invisible. It was only because I knew that it had to be there that I was able to make it out (then it was easy to see, like those 3-D puzzles).

So I didn't lose my car - I just lost an hour or so in looking for it, plus the ten years or so that it took off my life (it occurred to me that that car is my prized possession, and that maybe He had decided that it was too important to me, so He was going to relieve me of the worry by relieving me of the possession :) - but at my age, what's another ten years or so? - the worst part was that it got me home late, after a long convention weekend, and with the next workday waiting for me.

No, wait - that's not all it cost me. It also cost me my old iPod; the big 80GB one, in fact, as during the rust to get out of the car and into the airport, I dropped it outside of my car, and now somebody else has it. I hope that they like Weird Al Yankovic...


¹Well, what would YOU call a resident of Dallas? (And don't say "J.R" :)