Robert Gentel’s Blog

I’d only meant to quickly drop my girlfriend off at a friend’s house in Heredia but the trip took a decidedly nasty turn for the worse when my brakes (all of the bastards!) decided to desert me on Costa Rica’s busiest street during rush hour. That wasn’t too bad as I managed to avoid a slow motion collision by zig-zagging through the cars stopped at the intersection and using hand signals (looked a lot like the signal in Team America for the undercover operative being in danger) to persuade a bus that was making a turn in front of me to hang out for a bit in the intersection. The bus served as a nice shield to run the light and pull over and I called information to get a tow truck.

The traffic was bad so I was told it would take a while to get there and that they’d call me. Costa Rica doesn’t employ the luxury of a system of addresses and “directions” are used in their stead. So I was telling the driver that I was about 200 meters away from Pizza Hut on the other side of the street but he must have needed to do a verification fly-by since he passed me right up. I called the tow-truck company and they gave me the driver’s cellphone. I called him and he told me how he didn’t see “anybody” (mind you, this is rush hour) at the indicated location. I told him that I was quite there and I did, in fact, need a tow and he told me he’d give it another fly-by, though it’d take time due to the “tremendous” traffic he was engaged in across the city (just minutes after driving by). He said to make sure to stand out by the road at the indicated location so I stood there for an eternity and he pulled up right in front of me in traffic, then kept on going without looking on the side of the road at the store I told him I was in front of.

I called him as he slowly crawled away in traffic and told him I was right behind him and waved. He looked back and promptly told me he saw “nobody” and kept going, promising to give it another try. Not entirely convinced I wanted a ride with such a comprehensively-challenged individual, I began to look for options and called information again for a tow truck and they immediately sent me to the automated voice reading me the same phone number of the tow truck company I’d been wrestling with several times before I managed to get the operator to halt and give me a couple of options.

I called a few of the companies I was recommended over the next hours who all failed to show up, never daring to leave the side of the road to go to the bathroom. Waiting on foot by the side of the road was boring despite the number of odd folk who passed by (like the Japanese back-packer asking for directions in hillarious Spanish for a ridiculously far place to be headed to on foot). And waiting in the cold in a T-shirt got old fast with the whole having to go to the bathroom quite urgently thing so I just kept calling information and canvassing the Costa Rica’s tow trucks (maybe they are all just smarter than the rest of the country and avoid rush hour altogether) before one promptly showed up in 15 minutes as promised and we loaded up the car and drove off while I imagined a veritable swarm of tow trucks descending upon the vacated location I’d been waiting at.

I finally got home over 6 hours after I left more than a bit frustrated with my car. I even lost my temper momentarily and called it a harsh word that hurt its feelings. I don’t care and I don’t know what the hell is wrong with the car but I’ve decided to only find out long enough to fix and sell it. See, I have this rule about not trusting cars that try to kill me, especially when they try to do it at very low rush-hour speeds. That shows spite since they clearly want the death to be as painful as possible (the automobile’s equivalent of death by spoon).