Parking While Entitled
April 1st, 2008 by 
Madeleine Robins
Other than it being April 1, what was up today? I took Sarcasm Girl to the pediatrician (I thought it was bronchitis; turned out to be an ear infection–how did I confuse the two?) and there was not only nowhere to park in the lot outside the medical building, but several cars were circling around, vulture-like, to be the first to any spot that opened up. I dropped the girl off and parked on the street. No harm, no foul.
After the doctor’s visit, we went up to the shopping center in Diamond Heights where our pharmacy is, to pick up medications (as a sidelight, I’m considering writing a children’s book to be called More Drugs for Betsy! or something like that. At the moment it’s a title-only project, but if anyone wants to collaborate, let me know). And here the problem was less that there weren’t any spaces than that people had parked in such a way as to render the adjacent spaces unusable except by motorcycles or palanquins. It’s not that I haven’t seen bad parking before, but I’ve rarely seen so much of it at one time.
Is it National Entitlement Day and I didn’t get the memo? I tend to check where I’ve parked when I get out, and am not above getting back in the car and repositioning it if I feel I’m too close to the next guy. (Too, we have a Honda Civic, which is a little smaller than an Escalade Pick-Up*.) But the cheery assumption, by the driver of the white Mazda convertible, that it was really not a problem if she parked diagonally across a space, fascinates me. I watched as the young woman (mid-20s, I’d guess) zipped into the lot, tore down one lane and up another, and swerved into a spot so that her front left bumper was about six inches from the car already parked in the left-adjacent slot, and her right rear bumper overhung the dividing line for the space by a good eighteen inches. Then she bounced out of the car and sauntered into the Safeway.
Okay, this is partly envy on my part: I can’t get away with this sort of behavior, not just because I’m not a cute blonde in my 20s with a Mazda, but because of my early bad training in not taking up other people’s space. Actually, I think that was, at least as far as parking is concerned, pretty good training. And the Cute Blonde isn’t alone, of course (or at least she wasn’t today).
So I ask again: was today National Park Like an Asshole Day?
*and why in God’s name would anyone who really wanted a pickup truck buy one from Cadillac? They look like tanks, but if I’m going to spend $66K for a vehicle, it’s not one I’m likely to be hauling ladders and paint and construction debris in. Or even mountain bikes or Jet Skis, which leave their own mechanical slime trails. I’m just sayin’.
Posted in Daily Life | 
15 Comments »
April 1st, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I used to work for a small medical electronics company. If you lined the employees up out in the parking lot and then paired them with their vehicles you would find an inverse relationship in size. The largest people drove the smallest cars and vice versa.
Here in Texas I think they give a driving test. If you can drive you are not allowed to buy an SUV or pickup. Needless to say, SUVs and pickups constitute most of the vehicles on the road. And yes, every day is Park Like an Asshole Day.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:18 pm
These days that means that I can more easily find places to park my motorcycle. But I’m not grateful to the idiots involved.
I still have an urge to put a hole in one or two of their tires when I encounter these particular examples of self-importance. So far, I’ve resisted the urge….
Signed,
A Cranky Old Man With a Knife
****
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:03 am
Oh, Rory, when you get the urge, come visit me in San Francisco…
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 am
I think we need to be able to ping them with bad sammies.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:53 am
My wife, who’s the driver in the family, won’t let me vandalize poorly parked cars. She won’t even let me keep a bar of soap in the glove box so I can write instructive messages on them.
Although recently I had the lovely experience of screaming threatening obscenities at a two-spacer only to notice as I passed it that the horrified driver was still sitting inside. Ahhhhh… I’ve still got a bit of a glow.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:54 am
We’re not alone. I discovered pages and pages of Bad Parking websites when I was looking for a good image for this post. As Arlo Guthrie says, if enough people sing along we got ourselves a movement…
I hadn’t even thought of soap.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
Soap is a great idea. Low-tech bad sammies!
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
They make glass chalk nowadays in a varity of lurid colors, I think it was invented for tagging rouge parkers.
While visiting San Francisco recently I saw cars parked on sidewalks and in moving lanes of traffic!
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
You guys are soooo much nicer than I am…..
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I once parked at the vet, took the cat inside and when I came out, found that someone else had parked mere nanometers from my driver’s side door. Plenty of room on the other side for that driver to get out. Of course, it was a gravel lot with no marked spaces, but still… I was cursing pretty loudly to myself about the inconsiderate driver of the *large* vehicle as I crawled in through the passenger door, over the gearshift to get into my Honda. What were they thinking?
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Problem is they aren’t thinking. Most times. My partner has a word for this. Oblivious.
In the larger parking lots, I try to park in the spaces furthest away. But even that does not always work. In a field full of empty spaces, some clown in a megamobile sidled up to my driver side door anyway. Now, that’s frigging intentional.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Morgan, I gotta ask: bad sandwiches?
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Actually, sammy-pinging comes from my latest book, and it’s sheer wish fulfillment.
In the story, it’s several hundred years from now, and everyone is always online. There’s a software that lets you tag people with anonymous good-sammies and bad-sammies. (“sammies” as in Samaritans, as in good samaritans). You basically just point a finger and make a gesture, and they get an aw-shit or an atta-boy/ girl in their sammy cache. Cory Doctorow had a similar concept with whuffie in his DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGICAL KINGDOM.
Nowadays, I am always mentally pinging people. Man do I want that ability. I might even choose it over super-strength, or flight, or invisibility…
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I used to have a pack of fake tickets, I guess I can re-make them now that I have the production methods in my own hands (bwa ha ha).
You aren’t being a vandal, just slipping a piece of paper under their windshield. We’re not going to talk about the language on the ‘ticket.’
Another way to deal is to put a matchstick in one or more of their tire valves. That is, if you’re sure the parking lot doesn’t have video surveillance.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Paula Helm Murray speaks for me.
BTW, I was in the Diamond Heights parking lot yesterday.
People were parking in two spaces to save their paint jobs. I.Can.Not.Tell.You how pissed off I get.