View more pictures


Getting the boot isn’t the best way to wake-up on a rainy day. The latest in the saga of Brookline parking occurred last night. I had been thinking of parking in the lot on Harvard street next to the Corrib Pub. I had researched it by talking to the parking attendant Tim. He let me know a few weeks ago that they have parking for $10 per night there. So last night I decided to leave the PT Cruiser in Cambridge for the night rather than shlep it out to Newton for the night. I drove over to the lot and while nobody was there they did have a sign saying that if the attendant wasn’t there that I could put money into a slot at a minimum of $2. I put a $10 bill into the slot wrapped inside a receipt with some information on which car had paid that I wrote using a pen from my bag.

As I walked from the car back to the apartment the signs did all warn me that I might get towed or booted. But I decided that I would take a risk for once and get engaged with this parking lot. Sure it doesn’t have the charm and personality of Richie’s place but it is a parking space. There is a nice attendant. He wouldn’t screw me. I worried a bit about the consequences of parking there before going to bed. My parking worries might explain my dream the other night when I was taking a class with Bill Gates and although he is the richest man on earth we were both late and trying to find our way to the class together. When we both got there the professor didn’t care who either of us were and yelled at us for being late.

So when I awoke this morning I walked through the rain without having put my socks on under my black shoes and when I got to the lot I was at first ecstatic to see my green PT Cruiser still there. I hadn’t gotten towed. What a relief. Then as I approached the car I looked down to see a bright neon orange boot attached to my front tire and a matching neon ticket stuck to the window. The ticket told me to call a phone number and to bring the ticket with me. It didn’t identify who or where or what had booted me. I looked in the booth for Tim, the friendly guy with the goatee but he was nowhere to be found. So I walked by to the apartment in the rain. I hadn’t brought the phone so I didn’t call the number until I returned to the apartment. At first when I called I got a voice mail. Then the booters called me back and let me know that if I wanted to move my car again that I needed to pay $150 in cash to friendly Tim and he could remove the boot.

So I asked Sarah whether she wanted any bagels. I put my shoes back on but still didn’t put socks on. Then I went to the bank machine, took out $160 in cash, bought six bagels and veggie cream cheese. I made sure to get Rosemary Olive bagels for Sarah since that is her preferred bagel these days. I paid Tim $150 and we cut a deal so that I could park for one night using the pass for the $10 that I had put in the slot. He struggled for about fifteen minutes while I watched him remove the boot in the rain. He felt bad but there was nothing he could do to prevent me from paying the money. It is exactly $150 to park for a month. So I started the day feeling like an idiot for having wasted lots of time and energy to park for a night at a bill $10 more than what it would cost to park for a month.

Later in the day I was at Viapoint. We are still getting things going. I got to thinking about software and marketing early stage products. I was also thinking about the comments from the Marine yesterday who asked Donald Rumsfeld why they had to dig through scrap metal to armor their vehicles. The answer Rumsfeld gave was “You go to war with the army that you have”. That’s just the way it is with products and going to market. You can’t wait for the perfect product. You just need to market that product as best you can and keep making it better to fit the market. The war is either competitors or apathy. But you gotta go into it with what you have.

We had borrowed Leelin for the day. I did this so that Sarah would have a playmate while she was home. Sarah had decided that today would be a mental-health/sick day today because she awoke with a splitting head-ache. It was a good thing to see the pug dog. I feel paternal towards him and was happy all day just having seen him for fifteen minutes in the morning.

At dinner Lisa and Dave told a story about going to Marshfield. They had gotten there and when Lisa went to the bathroom she saw two floating objects in the toilet. What she found there were two floating dead mice. A single dead mouse seems to be a reasonable thing to occur but why would two mice both drown in the toilet. So their impression was that it was likely that a crazy individual was in the house with them who had the potential to kill mice and might want to move up the food chain to larger mammals. In the morning when they went for a walk they found a dead opossum in the yard. The possum wasn’t playing possum. It had a good side and a bad side. Because of this the transfer into pizza box that they put it into worked better with the stick-thong approach than with the roll approach.

The Chanukah dinner was funny because it started out just like last year with my dad cutting himself on the food processor long before having processed any food. So my dad was at the drug store buying better band-aids instead of making the latkes. We had dinner with everyone but were missing the salt shaker so Bill, Dave Falk’s dad, had to use the original salt from the super-market.

Anyways. I’m still feeling stupid for having gotten the boot. It will take me a while to recover.