Sometimes Things are Exactly as They Seem

We got a lot of snow this week. Aside from generally sucking, it makes parking in the Hoboken/Weehawken area something that takes the stars aligning to accomplish. But yesterday, I headed up the boyfriend's place around 10 p.m. and got parking right in front of his building. Awesome.

It was also garbage night, and oh boy, was it piled up. So, while parking, I managed to dislodge a bag from it's pile and it got stuck under my tire. After expressing my concern about the snow and the garbage and whether or not I'd be able to get my car out in the morning, my wonderful boyfriend helped me get the bag of garbage out from under my car.

"All the snow everywhere and you manage to run over garbage," he noted. Well, yea, welcome to being Jen Minchin. But whatever, garbage issue solved.

This morning, I was leaving for work and my car was making a weird new noise. My car has been through the ringer the past year so I just assume weird things are going to continue to happen until one day I am driving and it just falls apart around me. Then I'll be all Fred Flintstone like pushing a car frame down Route 3 with my feet. Anyways, so my car is making this weird noise. I texted my friend and described it as, "metal scraping the pavement." But I figured since it's been, I don't know, all of 7 degrees out, there was probably ice stuck somewhere and the whole thing would just resolve itself. I turned the radio up.

Traffic today was horrendous, which, in retrospect was fairly convenient. As I was sitting in traffic a woman stopped next to me motioning to the back of my car, but then drove away. I shrugged and kept rocking out to T. Swift. A couple of minutes later a guy in a white van pulled up next me and motioned for me to roll down my window. So I did.

"You have wire ALL OVER the back of your car!" He warned.
"Interesting," I thought.

Then dude jumps out of his van and tries to get it off of my car. (That's where the aforementioned convenient bumper-to-bumper traffic comes in.) But alas, the wire wasn't going anywhere. He told me to try a gas station and see if they had wire cutters. So, I did. When I pulled into the gas station and got out of my car I laughed at how ridiculous the situation was. There was like four feet of tangled up barbed wire-like coils hanging from my muffler trailing behind the car like a metal wedding veil. But, good to know my sound deduction skills are dead on. It WAS metal scraping the pavement. (What the hell was in that garbage I ran over last night??)

Here's an artist's rendering of the situation:

I managed to get the wires off of my muffler just as the guy from the white van pulled up behind me letting me know he found wire cutters. (See, there are good people left in this world!) I discarded the strange coiled wires in the gas station's garbage and I headed back out into the standstill traffic...which was no longer convenient.