Name: Stolen Car. Drew Barth
Uploaded: 2021-06-08T05:10:05.000Z
Duration: 6 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

That was a new experience that I had to deal with last year.

I don't know if anybody's ever had their car stolen before.

More than like, seriously, more than anything, it was just a massive inconvenience.

I came out, came out of my apartment building one morning, cup of coffee.

It was just street parking, came over and it was just car, car, no car... no broken glass on the ground or anything.

And I was like, "Huh, I totally forgot where I parked my car."

(Inaudible) because you don't just default to evil or anything.

You just, you're like, "No, I'm an idiot, I probably forgot where I parked it," walks around the whole block chuckling to myself.

It's gonna be so funny where I found my car - It's gonna be hilarious.

I was like, "Yeah, all right, now I need to make a phone call, apparently."

And there was a part of me that thought, you know what?

Maybe my car was towed because my car had been towed before.

I had some parking tickets with the city of Seattle.

Uh, I thought my parking tickets were decent, although according to the city, I also had several outstanding parking tickets, so not to brag, but they, uh, they don't give those out to anybody.

But it also didn't quite feel like my car had been towed because normally when your car gets towed, it's because you left it somewhere you don't feel 100 percent about.

Like, maybe you're in a big hurry to get somewhere, you get like the last spot on the curb in front of the restaurant you're going to.

But then like the back third of your car is hanging a little bit into the crosswalk to the point where as you're walking away, you're like, "I don't know if that's going to be there when I."

I bet you say to your friends, "Guys, if you don't mind, I'm just gonna move my car quickly."

They're like, "Well, what are they going to do?"

"What are you gonna tow your car," and then your car gets towed, and those people disappear.

They will not drive you to a tow yard later.

So I called the police, uh, well actually, first, I called a buddy of mine who lived about a block away whose car had been stolen a month earlier, and I was like, "Hey dude, I think my car got stolen."

"They'll start walking you through it, and they'll get in touch with your insurance and everything."

He's like, "When do you think they stole your car?"

I was like, "I don't know, like two in the morning or so."

He's like, "Uh, sucks, don't you wish you could have caught the people stealing your car?"

"Like, what? What would you imagine I have done?"

So I called the Seattle Police Department.

I said, "Uh, yes, I believe my vehicle's been stolen," and they're like, "Okay, what kind of car do you have?"

People chuckling, they're like, "Oh, I've stolen one of those."

I never realized how easy was to break into except for one time I accidentally bumped into it a little too hard, and the driver's side door open and the engine started, which I think is a design flaw.

(Inaudible) I call the police, I was like, "I have a 98 Honda Civic."

They laughed and then they're like, "Yeah, that's gone."

"Uh, probably not gonna get the back, just get in touch with your insurance."

So I called my insurance agency, and they started walking me through the process asking me a lot of questions about my car, about the condition it was in, to kind of determine what the value was going to be.

And my car was not in great condition because it had gotten to a point where I've had it ever since high school, and now it was just about kind of getting from point A to point B.

It's just your car, like it gained a personality.

I don't know if anybody else named their car.

Uh, I named him Doug, which I know it's not a fancy kind of name, but it fits because he had one headlight that kind of looked off in another.

He just gave off this "duh" kind of vibe.

But he had a lot of cracks and dents and scratches and things.

So as this woman is asking all these questions, I figured she's going to get to the end and be like, "Okay, based on our calculations, we'll be sending you a bag of gummy bears."

Somehow it got to the very end, and she said, "Okay, based on our calculations, we're gonna be sending you a check for $4,200."

I hung up really, really fast, and I took the $4,200, combined it with my wife's sterling credit history, and together we got a new car, which was great.

Follow up on that story, about eight months later, I got another call from the Seattle Police Department and they said, "Hey, uh, we've, we've located your vehicle."

"I don't want you guys to go out of your way or anything."

He was like, no, "It was abandoned in a neighborhood."

"You can go down and take a look, see if you enter your personal effects are still there."

"Also, we've been in touch with your insurance agency."

"They're sending somebody down there as well."

And my first thought was, "Oh no, they're gonna want some of that money back."

I guarantee you, there's gonna be a guy walking around my car with a clipboard being like, "All right, whoa wait, wait."

"You guys, somebody moved the decimal point."

"That headlight doesn't even look in the right direction."