Car mafia

For those who don't know, we live in a big building on a very fast-moving, busy street in Cairo that has very little parking. Certainly not enough for all the cars that belong to the people in the building. The solution: Car mafia!

The car mafia that lives in our building takes care of all our parking. We simply drive up to the building, double park the car, and go on up to our apartment. The car mafia -- a multiple man team whose main players are two guys called Ayman and Ramadan -- finds a place on the street for our car and parks it. Ramadan has a spare set of keys, and Ayman does services like cleaning the car for a fee. They are available basically 24 hours a day, and we pay them a monthly fee for the service that would seem insanely cheap in the U.S.

For tips, they will also carry up your groceries for you or do various other services.

You would think this is a great service, but it is actually incredibly annoying. There is no option, for example, to NOT use them. And recently it seems to have taken another turn, toward serious corruption.

First of all, we have noticed that whenever they seem to need extra money, they clean the car's inside without asking us first and then as for a fee for this service. Recently they have been "cleaning" our car multiple times a week and demanding we pay. And their monthly fees have gone up well over 100 percent since we moved in less than two years ago.

We have also noticed that we have gotten an extraordinary number of flat, punctured tires on our car that need to be replaced. The car mafia, actually Ayman in particular, is constantly coming up to our apartment to inform us of a flat tire, which he will then volunteer to replace for us for a fee. This has happened three times in the past three months. Somehow the flat tires always seem to happen when the car is parked downstairs, and always when Ayman is on duty to conveniently knock on our door and offer to fix it. The tire has never gone flat when we are out and about. And miraculously, Mike has never had a flat tire at work.

Additionally, the car simply wouldn't start one morning when Ayman was on duty and we had to be somewhere very early. We opened the hood but couldn't see any problem. Ayman called his friend the mechanic who managed to miraculously fix the car while we were out, and we could never get a clear answer as to what the problem was. And our car is a Toyota that is less than two years old.

Mike has been convinced for some time that Ayman was scamming us -- sabotaging our car and then offering to fix it for a fee plus hefty tips. But I was not entirely convinced. Now, I am convinced. Today, we had our third flat tire. Ayman came upstairs less than 30 minutes after we came home and rang the doorbell. We didn't answer it because Maya was sleeping. Later, when we went out for a walk, Ayman came and followed us and showed us that our tire was flat. Then he showed us a huge pin that was in the tire (that we had supposedly driven over), and pulled it out of the car. Mike was mad, but he just told Ayman we didn't want to deal with it then, and we left on our walk. We specifically did NOT ask Ayman to fix it, as we had previously decided that e ould not give him business for car problems any more.

When we came home, Ayman had already replaced our tire with the spare from the trunk, as well as pounded out a dent in the car, and was hitting us up for money for these "services", plus asking for additional money for "cleaning" the car. None of which are services that we had asked him to do. Grrrrr. What an annoying way to start a weekend!