Slumberland » TBT Towing speaks out:
Last week I wrote a post here about predatory towing, which referred to the business practices of TBT Towing, as reported in the P-I.
I’m not poking fun, as I hope you’ll see.
Local weblogger Wendi Dunlap posted some comments about some really crummy tactics used by local towing companies, essentially staking out locations at closing time in order to tow cars without giving the owners an opportunity to drive away. It seems the GM of one of the companies did a little Googling for his company’s name in response to a news story about it and didn’t like what he saw.
You can read it all at the linked post. What I found interesting was that the towing guy was treating a weblog he found in Google’s results as a a news organization on par with the Seattle P-I. He seemed to think he had the attention of the editor/publisher of a newspaper (and in a sense, he did). I’m inclined to be charitable to someone who engages in a dialog, even if I don’t agree with all their facts.
This is part of the hype about weblogs, the whole notion of everyman’s printing press. But this is the first time I have seen a weblog treated as part of the press this way.
<updated> mispelled name of our heroine fixed: sorry about that
4 Comments
Hi, Paul. My name is Wendi, not Wendy. ;) But that’s OK, everyone gets it wrong anyway.
I also thought it was interesting that he seemed to think Slumberland was a news publication of some sort. It seems pretty clear to me that it’s opinion, but I imagine he didn’t read the other posts on the site, and might not even be all that used to weblogs.
It certainly makes me think a little bit more about what I post on the site. I still think that TBT overstepped the bounds, and I don’t tend to assume that the press are evil forces intentionally misquoting everyone (I used to be part of the press and the people I worked with were pretty damned ethical, actually). But I should remember that I’m not always seeing both sides of the story.
I appreciate that he was making the effort to discuss the situation (and hasn’t tried to shut the whole thing down). That’s really what I enjoy most about weblogs — the ability to have that dialogue.
Thanks for the interesting thoughts about the situation.
Thanks for the spelling fix. :)
The fact that I mistakenly thought that the web site was a news site instead of a dialogue site is a tribute to how well it was put together and written.
Thanks for your kind words about being open to dialogue and “not shutting the whole thing down”.
It is almost always true that in conflicts rarely is either position 100% right or 100% wrong. This concept was true in the towing and impound issue. Those of us in the towing industry need to constantly be aware that everything we do or say is going to somehow impact the life of someone else and we need to be more sensative to that. At the same time, we have a responsibility to dialogue with different perspectives AND learn from them.
I don’t think that the local media is “evil”. 19 months ago when our home burned down and my then 16 month old granddaughter was critically burned and spent almost six months at Harborview I dealt with the local media almost every day and most of them are ethical and compassionate. But, there are times when a reporter will take off with the presumed “story” and bottom line of that story already predetermined in his/her mind without fairly researching all of the facts and talking to all involved. Just like the towing business, it only takes a few reporters taking unfair shortcuts to reflect poorly on the entire media.
Thanks for taking the time to care!
Rick Woodrow
My son sometimes parks in the empty lot of Implant Dentistry, in West Seattle late at night. There were no signs posted regarding towing last night. This morning, signs were posted and my son’s car was gone. The staff at Implant Dentistry claims that my son received verbal and written notices not to park there, which he says he never received. He simply parked there for convenience, thinking that the owner of Implant Dentistry was allowing him that courtesy. Apparantly not…it cost me $264. to retrieve my son’s car (he is a student with no income)and that is no small matter for me, since I have been disabled for 6 years, and am low-income. I tried to talk to the dentist, but was told he was “busy”, and the woman at TBT Towing was just as rude and closed to admitting the stupidity of this practice. Yes, technically, the owner of Implant Dentistry has the right to post signs and tow anyone who disobeys, but in this case, it seems that they posted the signs and immediately proceeded to tow my son’s car. What kind of c*** is that?