Terror At The Tollbooth

We went out to visit Dan, Faith and Silas (who lives in a silo... just ask Garrett).

It was a nice visit. Well, that's what I was told, given that everyone I went to the hospital with disappeared and left me with Garrett for the longest 20 minutes ever (for the record, it was an hour and a half... in a hospital... with no toys!)

ANYWAY, Silas is cute and baby shaped. I'm sure I'll have better impressions of him when I actually, you know, get to see him (no, I'm not bitter). I think we might have some pictures and I'll try to get them up soon.

We went back to the car and made our way to the exit. We had our little card ready to go and just needed to pay... Here's where things went pear-shaped. We tried to pay with a credit card (which it clearly stated we could do) but nooo... Credit Card Declined!

We tried at the other booth/gate thingy. DENIED! We figured we'd try paying with cash in the machine... oh, lookie! No area to accept bills.

So we drove around and sent Tim out to try to pay the little magnetic card at the pay meter outside the parking garage.

No dice. We STILL can't get it to work and are trapped in the parking garage. Julie got some change and we were going to try that but then a guy drove in front of us at the gate. We figured we'd watch to see if his change would work in the twisted bowels of that hell-spawned gate. Of course, we got stuck behind the one guy in all of Kitchener who COULDN'T ROLL DOWN HIS DRIVER'S SIDE WINDOW.

So we then had this ballet where he had to wiggle around and try to back his car far enough that he could lean out the door to reach the machine and still have the car on the sensor. Of course, we're now hitting the 20 minute mark on our sojourn from the parking garage and I'm livid.

The guy FINALLY gets the gate to go up and that gave us a chance to try to escape. Sadly, the gate came down before we could sneak out with him BUT he had obviously put in too much change and it only cost us $2.00 instead of $7.00 to leave.

But I'll be damned if I'm ever parking in that god forsaken parking garage again.

I won't even go into the other strange things like the crazed Rice Boys at the Tim Horton's parking lot or the insane trucks on the 401 on the way home, but at least I didn't crash the car and the aneurysm from the parking garage incident didn't kick in and kill me (not for lack of trying).

And here I was, starting to think that the pall of evil and doom that tends to hang over Kitchener/Waterloo had lifted and I could actually not cringe in fear when crossing into town. Nope. It's still there and is darker and more vindictive than ever.