face
Remember how I told a story about how I felt C.M. Ferraro, the cop, had been hanging out in the parking lot of the place where more of the poor shop locally looking for those who were committing the crimes of poverty the poor are more likely to commit than the richer people so as to be able to write a bunch of county court income producing tickets?
My wife was sick and I was glad to be well enough to drive and go do something for her since she needed a particular sort of cough syrup. It was right expensive cough syrup. She likes to shop at the place where the less well off shop you know. They like her there. They like my wife in all the store where she shops.
I had had no idea that there was anything wrong with the car. Turned out it was out of inspection and late on the taxes. It was my fault really because I’d had a problem with how the car window was fixed at her favorite garage. She was emotionally conflicted about returning and put things off as a result.
We were going to go to another garage. I ended up at the real nice looking place Carolina Car Center now it is. Used to be Chapel Hill Tire, there near the nicest PTA thrift shop in the nation. They said it, the Camry, needed twelve hundred dollars worth of work to pass inspection. I had no idea this car was in such terrible shape. It certainly didn’t seem so. I asked why they thought I needed to get it 4 new tires, considering the tread didn’t look bad. They said the tires were 10 years old and dry rotted.
I’ve not been driving much after all the operations and the then broken leg. I asked about the tires and my wife said the tires weren’t as old as the Carolina Car Center said they were. Other things said to be wrong with the car were fixable with some attention to grease and fluids. But we were in a bind and I was trying to think of ways to salvage the car or even parts of it.
My wife and her mother took it to the garage where I, now an apparently crotchety old man, had had a problem with the way they fixed the window last winter. The window had stopped working. It was the drivers side window and wouldn’t go up and down. Before I broke my leg, I had started to drive, and this thing with the window was a problem.
I did a good deal of mechanic work and was aware of the mechanics getting all mad about it if you tried to fix something yourself, but had tried anyway. I had tried to show them where I was and what parts they needed to be aware of that I had put in a box. They hadn’t looked at it saying it was okay they could deal with it. If they had looked at it things would have gone better. My wife gets along with them. I don’t.
In fact anyway when my wife and her mother took it to the garage, the one I’d had a problem with, the car was passed without needing more than windshield wipers. Windshield wipers don’t last near as long as they used to.
Luckily when my wife went to the court all the charges were dismissed.
So C.M.Ferraro would have done as well to have written me a warning ticket instead of a full fledged citation. I did ask her Supervisor to check on the citations and warning tickets that Officer Ferraro wrote that Sunday to see if there was a pattern.
It isn’t good for unsafe cars to be on the roads. I don’t think she actually really thought that there was something unsafe about the car. (I wrote a story about the stop earlier on this site.)
The Carolina Car Center lied to me about why I needed to spend 12 hundred dollars to get the car to pass inspection. The tires are not as old as they said and do not have dry rot. It is actually fraud to lie to your customers you know.
If their defense is that they are incompetent, then it is fraud for them to put up a sign and say they will properly fix your car.
My revenge here and now is the simple truth of the story which if widely known in the community ought drive down business since if you have need of a mechanic for your car, then you are forewarned Carolina Car Center isn’t a sane and sensible place to take it since they are either liars or incompetent.
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On another issue about policing in the community, it is standard operating procedure for the Carrboro police to stop you if they think you are a stranger in town. Does being a stranger, a visitor maybe, amount to “probable cause”?
Should we put up a sign where you enter town on 54 or from the direction either way on all roads entering that announces: In Carrboro We Stop Strangers.
Is stopping strangers “best practices” for all police everywhere? I have a suspicion that it does not reach legally the level of true probably cause.