Vehicle damage is one of those gray areas in towing that sometimes requires a crystal ball to divine the truth. Questioning drivers becomes a psychological exercise.  Outright denial is my favorite.  I called one driver shortly after he left work one day, and I explained to him that he had parked his truck a little too close to a vehicle in our storage lot.  He was driving an Eagle, and the fold cylinder had been leaking, so he flopped down the stinger before parking the truck, which was a good idea.  That way the stinger couldn't flop down on its own onto something important on its own.  Well, the problem was that he backed up a little too close to the Chrysler 300M that he was parking in front of.  "No way," he said.  "I know I didn't hit that car."  I explained to him that the end of the Eagle Claw was still inserted into the front bumper of the Chrysler.  "Someone else must have moved the truck," he said (he had been gone about 10 minutes).  Right, I said, and could he bring back the keys to the truck so we could move it away from the damaged vehicle?  Silence.I asked him if he had the keys still.  Might they be in one of his pockets? More silence.  "Yes," he finally admitted.

That conversation with the vehicle owner, when you tell them that their car has been damaged—always fun.

On another occasion, I had 2 complaints in one day for tow light damage.  Both vehicles had been towed by the same driver, from the same location, impounds.  A Mercedes SUV, and a Toyota Landcruiser.  The damage was similar, circular scratches matching the size of the round magnets used on magnetic Tow Lights, on the roof of the vehicle on the passenger-side.  The next time the driver came to the
lot, with a car in-tow, I came out and explained to him that I had received the complaints.  "No way," he said, "I'm always very careful when I take tow lights off the car."  No twisting, I asked?  "No, definitely not."  He was towing an old beater that had been abandoned, so I asked him to show me how careful he was, with the car he was towing.  He carefully lifted the tow lights off the car and put them on the back of his truck. Then I asked him to put them back on.  Rolling his eyes, he walked the lights back to the car, and carefully placed them on the car.  Then he plugged the cord back into the socket, grabbed the cord, and slung it up on top of the car from right next to the tow truck, like he’s on one end of a hellaciously long jump rope.  The cord hit the car's roof with a loud bang.  I walked over to the tow light on his side and showed him how it was now pointing sideways.  The pull on the cord was twisting the magnet around 90 degrees with gale-force whip action.  My next question, I said to him, is did you put the light back the right way without checking to see if you scratched the paint underneath, or did you drive to the lot with the light pointing sideways?

I wonder how many cars he damaged before someone looked on their roof.

One driver wanted to change a rear tire on a Chevy S10 pickup, but he didn't want to jack it up, so he lifted the rear with
his truck and placed a jackstand under the side with the flat tire.  Problem was, he placed the jackstand under the rear side panel of the truck, rather than the frame or a sturdy suspension component.  The fender folded.  At least he got the pleasure of being present when the vehicle owner witnessed the damage.

 Have a safe and profitable week.

Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com
http://www.facebook.com/#!/towpartsnow

As we approach the end of another year, New Year's Eve brings back a particularly poignant memory from my driving career.  I worked several years for an impound company that expanded its operation to a second storage facility approximately 10 miles from the original location.  We got on the police rotation in that area, and we began taking our private property impounds from that side of town to that new storage location.  However, the original location remained our central location, where the dispatcher answered the main phone lines, where the trucks were stationed, and where all of the drivers reported to work.  Since much of our work came from the downtown core area of the city, within 2 or 3 miles of the original location, it became like a death knell for the driver who was dispatched to the "Eastside" for a call or a vehicle release.

What was worse was being dispatched to the "Eastside" near the end of your shift, because it would take forever to get out there, complete the call or vehicle release, and then drive back to the central lot to turn in your truck and complete your shift.

My shift, as it happens, ended at Midnight every night. Maybe you can see where this is going.

Although I had no particular plan to celebrate the New Year as the clock turned to twelve, I was looking forward to getting off work at Midnight to join whatever party was going on that year with family and friends.  It was relatively slow that night, but around 10 o'clock, the dispatcher informed me that I had a couple of vehicle releases at the Eastside Lot scheduled for 23:59.

23:59?  What in the world?  Most of the time, when a vehicle owner discovers their car has been impounded, they either want to get it right away, or they have to make arrangements to pick it up at a time more convenient for them.  If the vehicle is impounded after 6 pm, or on the weekend, there is usually a financial incentive to pick it up the next day, if they can, because the overnight storage fee is normally already in effect, and the after-hours release fee increases the total.  Couple this with the fact that you wouldn’t think anyone would want to celebrate the annual calendar change at an impound lot in NE Portland, and you can see why I was confused.

After some investigation, we discovered that one of the new dispatchers had been confused about how vehicle storage charges were calculated.  She thought we charged by the calendar day, but in fact we charged by 24-hour period.  So everyone that called about picking up their car was told that at Midnight, the charges would go up.  A couple of vehicle owners whose vehicles were impounded together from the same location got the idea that they would get their money's worth and wait until the last minute before the charges increased.  Apparently they were unhappy about getting their cars impounded, and they were making a statement of some kind.

So, just before Midnight on New Year's Eve, I drove out to the Eastside Lot, the armpit of the world, and I rang in the New Year sitting in my truck, waiting for angry vehicle owners who never showed up.  They after-hours release fees would be applied to the tow bills, and I would get my measly commission on the small fees, but clearly they just wanted someone else to suffer, which is why they had set up the phantom lot meets.  I watched a few cheap fireworks being shot off from residential streets in the distance, listened to conspiracy theorists on AM radio, waited the required one hour from the time of the appointment, and began the drive back downtown at 00:59 of the New Year.  In was a very inauspicious beginning to the new year. 

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com

Spent some time on the phone recently with my good friend Kim who owns a tow company on Oahu.  We were talking about how we both "backed into" this business, almost against our will.  It reminded me of my humble beginnings in the industry, over 30 YEARS AGO, which is amazing because I'm only 38.

Okay, maybe not 38.

My older brother and my brother-in-law got jobs driving tow truck for Marty Oppenlander at Hillsboro Towing in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the mid-70s (wow, Marty, how old are YOU?). This gave my dad the CRAZY idea that he should buy a tow truck company to take advantage of their “expertise.”  Regardless of how strenuously people tried to stop him, he did it anyway.

My first "job" in the industry was to answer phones and run the storage yard through the summer when I was 15.  8 am-6 pm, Monday-Friday.  I got to live with my older brother, so that was fun.  Often I was out running calls with him all night and all weekend as well.  My
"salary?"  $200 per month.  Plus room and board, of course.

Some fun things I remember:
1. Helping to recover a Combine that rolled down a steep hill and crashed through some trees and had to be pulled up through the stumps about 300 yards.  When we got it out and hooked up to it, the heavy-duty wrecker we had kept slipping on the grassy field as we tried to drive up the steep incline.  It was another 1000 yards up to the road, so we didn't want to have to move-and-winch our way up.  My brother drove his short-box Chevy 4x4 down and we chained it to the front of the wrecker, and just that little bit of extra power got us up the hill.  Would have made a great video for GM.

2. Helping my brother-in-law paint an old convertible MG for a local police officer, and the spray gun wasn't working too well, so we were about halfway into the job when the runs in the paint were looking real bad.  My brother-in-law poked a hole in the paper covering the vehicle interior and drove off to a REAL body shop to sub-contract the work, with his head stuck out of the hole so that was all you could see of him as he drove down the road with the car still taped and papered (and half-painted).  He kind of looked like Mr. Bean.

The business didn't work out so well for my dad, so I SWORE that I would never work in towing.  Then, of course, in my early twenties,
my brother-in-law called me because he was managing a company and needed a driver.  The rest is history.  That was 1986.  Sometimes
I'm asked if I ever think about leaving the industry.  My pat answer: "Daily."  But here I am.  The industry seems to have its hooks in me, so to speak.  I imagine there are many of you out there who share that feeling.

Have a
safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com

Although I worked in the impound industry for many years, I did not do a lot of repos, but enough to have some good stories.  The first repo I ever did was for a small credit agency, on an early 70's model Chevy Nova.  The credit agency rep wanted to ride along, and one of the drivers who worked with me also wanted to ride along, so we all piled into a Ford Diesel (not ideal for repos) with an Eagle Claw and headed out.

The car was parked at a motel.  Seemed strange to me that the rep knew it was at a motel.  Turns out the vehicle owner was a lady-of-the-evening, and she was working.  I didn't feel particularly nervous, but the credit agency rep apparently was, because he starting breathing rapidly and heavily, almost to the point of hyperventilation.
  The angle to the back of the car was tough, so I didn't quite get the Eagle Claws set before lifting, and it slid off.  Then I got nervous.  I dropped it twice more before getting the claws set right.  The gas tank got kind of messed up.  But we got the car, and the agency rep was happy.

Many years later, the company I was working for got a repo contract for another small credit agency.  For these cars, we had owner info, but no one to find the vehicle for us, so it was a hunt-and-tow set-up.  One of the addresses, for a Dodge mini-van, was out in a rural area, so I waited until late (around midnight) and drove out to check it out.  The address was a mobile home in a very rural area.  No lights anywhere, except for a large floodlight on the front of the mobile home.  There were cars everywhere--on the lawn, in the driveway, behind the mobile home--about 15 total, but no Dodge mini-vans.  I was about to leave, and then I saw, out in the field behind the mobile home, the outline of the rear of a mini-van.  It looked like the right vehicle, but it was well off the road, on the other side of the mobile home.  There wasn't even a driveway out to where it was.  I sat there for several minutes and thought about it.  There was no easy access to the front of the van, which was a front-wheel drive, and that made it even more risky.  Finally I decided it wasn't worth the risk, and I drove back to the shop.

One of the other drivers asked me about it, and I gave him the scoop.  He told me he was going to go try to get the mini-van.  I told him he was nuts, and I went home.  The next day I came into work, and there was the mini-van.  He had driven out to the house, turned off his lights, backed ACROSS the front lawn, into the field, slid the wheellift through the tall grass under the bumper of the van, threw his safety chains around the rear axle and into the chain slots on the crossbar, lifted it up on the chains, and drug it back across the lawn, IN PARK.  The grass was slick, so the wheels just slid without tearing up the sod.  He got it out on the road, dropped it, turned around and grabbed it from the front, and got out of there.  He told me that while he was throwing the safety chains around the rear axle, the one thought in his head was, "When is the gunshot coming?"

Another driver I worked with did a similar repo in a rural area late at night.  He had an address, and he mapped it out in his Thomas Guide (days before GPS navigation).  He drove for miles on a rural road, and then it turned into gravel.  He drove farther, and then there was a gate.  He drove farther, and then there was a mobile home, with the K-5 Chevy Blazer with oversized tires he was supposed to repo, parked within a few feet of the trailer.  He snagged it from behind with his Eagle Claw, strapped it, and took off.  He told me later, "I was in such a hurry I didn't lift the claws high enough, so when I went through a dip it exploded the ratchet when it hit the ground."  Exploded the ratchet.  It would have exploded my HEART.   Who keeps going on a rural gravel road THROUGH A GATE?!?

Probably what the vehicle owner was thinking as he slept peacefully through it all in his mobile home.


Have a safe and
profitable week,

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com 

My daughter is learning to drive, and she’s doing fine with it, but it makes me remember some of MY escapades at that age.  Yikes!  It also reminds me of some accidents I covered, unfortunately. 

On one late evening, I was dispatched to W. Burnside Rd. in Portland, near the Washington Park Zoo, to recover an older Honda that was on its top about 50 yards off the road.  This was a wooded area, and the road went up a steep incline, but it was highly-traveled and narrow, so there were a lot of accidents on this road.  When I got to the scene, I tried to find where the vehicle went off the road, because it's often easiest to bring a car up the way it went down, but I couldn't, so I found the simplest route back to road, rolled the vehicle over, and pulled it up.

The next day, the vehicle's driver, 18 years old, and his mother arrived at the storage lot to view the vehicle and get some personal items.  He was pretty banged up, but okay, and I learned that there had been 5 teenagers in this little late 70s Civic, and that they were all okay, which was pretty amazing considering that there wasn’t a single piece of glass left in this car.  They couldn’t find his wallet.  I told them I would revisit the accident scene later that day and take a look for it, and give them a call if I found it.

That afternoon, I drove up to the scene and started looking for the wallet.  I couldn't find it, and I couldn't help noticing that there wasn't very much glass in the foliage and on the ground where the vehicle had lain on its top.  Also, I still couldn't see where the car had come off the road, which was strange.  As I looked around, I noticed some glass on a marked trail on the hillside above me, opposite the road, about 25 yards up the hill.  I hiked up to the spot, and sure enough, there was a pile of glass on the trail.  It was a wide trail, part of the Forest Park trail system, and I thought maybe they had been messing around, trying to drive this little car on the trail, and rolled off and down hill, but that didn't explain how the glass had gotten on the trail . Then I looked farther up the hill, and I saw the trail of crushed ferns and damaged brush.  I followed it uphill, passing a homeless person's tent about 5 feet from where the vehicle went, up about 500 yards, before I came to one of the Forest Park Roads.  There I found a long set of skid marks leading to the road corner.  I turned and looked down the hill to see how far this little car had flown into the air and rolled over-and-over down this steep, wooded incline, until it came to rest at the bottom of the gulch alongside the much busier Burnside Rd.

5 teenagers, and they all walked away.  I never found the wallet.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com