Launch the Space Shuttle, and Other Parking Adventures

Not long ago, after a 7 or so month wait, we had our parking space open up. We are allowed to park one car in the lot across the street, along with other public parkers, which is managed by a trio of Italian guys who look exactly how you would imagine Italian parking lot attendants to look. Perhaps not the smartest set of guys, but they work hard and are very nice. Of course there have been many adventures already; otherwise parking is not worth mentioning here.
To start, the guys keep a copy of our keys, so they can move our giant car around and accommodate space for “paying” customers. There are some rules: we are only allowed one car in the lot at a time and we leave our designated space mostly vacant during the day while I am at work. We elected to keep the Cady in the lot since Lauren prefers to drive the smaller BMW (see previous post on driving in Italy) and we have more sets of Cady keys. Of course, they were baffled, well not totally baffled, but at least confused by the Caddy with its automatic and manu-matic shifting options. They apparently mostly have experience on your more basic Fiats and what not which only have manual shift, as most cars in Europe. Then last week we had an incident.
Lauren went out to take the car someplace, which does not happen often as I usually drive it to work, and it reeked of smoke. When she confronted the parking guy about it, all in Italian (brava), he looked at her as if she was from the Moon and said “of course”. It seems our friend is a heavy smoker, judging from both the time I see him without a cigarette (never) and the gravelly sound of his voice. She threw what was later described as “my first Italian hissy-fit”. She said that I was “going to be very mad” (which may have been true but I couldn’t stop laughing at the telling of the story) and it involved several “No fumare in machine” and “come se dice ‘angry’ en Italiano?” Apparently to the amusement of several “paying customers” (all men) and the three parking amigos. I decided that the smoking in the car issue was covered so I did not address it the next time I ran into them.
Of course they speak zero English and so our conversations, the smoking incident notwithstanding, mostly involve “hellos’ and occasional direction on where to park. Then the other day I can home and the guys were in a bit of a pickle. It seems the lot was very full and many people were ready to leave. The only hang up was one very nice and very new BMW 5 or 7 series was blocking in several other cars. This is not uncommon since they play a kind of parking lot shuffle to maximize their parking usage. This car however was stumping them good. For starters they couldn’t figure out how to start it, so they enlisted me to help them out (I guess I was qualified since my car is “complicated” too. My car has nothing on this thing.
Just starting the thing is tricky, involving a key and 2 buttons. The shifter is not a consol shift like most of today’s cars, but a column shift…but not like your 1972 Buick. The shift lever is smaller than the blinker lever and involves, from what I deduced while driving, mostly electronics in shifting the gears. Furthermore, once the car is running the displays rival most aircraft I have flown; including GPS navigation, color displays, a head’s up display and sensors that prevent you from bumping things on all four sides with a corresponding color warning display. I don’t blame them for enlisting a professional aviator to handle such a complex high performance machine.