So pretty much you're an asshole is what you wanted to say? You didn't need to waste so much space doing that.
Ok, now my thoughts on the subject of space saving during snowstorms: Fuck right off. For those not in the know (and by that I mean live in climate that doesn't resemble Svalbard), in many northern cities people will dig their cars out after a snowstorm, thus clearing out the parking space their car occupied on a public street. They will then place some piece of (ghetto trash) furniture there to mark the spot and claim it as their own, ostensibly until the end of the snow emergency, but in practice for as long as they can get away with it. This unofficial squatting on public land is enforced through the usual methods of keying, tire slashing, and unique to this situation: buying the offending car in snow and ice. The rationale behind this abuse of public resources is that in clearing out the spot, the individual has invested labor into creating the spot and thus anyone else parking there is a theft of their labor. What these inbred morons fail to realize is that far from "creating" a parking spot, their parking there the night before has in fact prevented taxpayer funded plows from clearing the spot, and thus digging out the spot is the least they owe merely to return the spot to the state it would have been in had they not parked there during a snow emergency. To use an analogy you southerners might understand: If there is a heatwave that causes me to spend a large amount of time in the public pool, even during normal maintenance time (thus preventing proper chlorination of the pool or whatever) if I later myself do the maintenance I prevented the city employee from doing, that doesn't entitle me to throw up a pool chair and claim the pool as my unique province for the duration of the heatwave.
I go to a college with 50,000 students and 15,000 parking spots...so things can get a little hairy. I've been glared at, flicked off, and even been in a Seinfeld style Mexican parking standoff.* My personal philosophy is to avoid the ever popular "parking place stalk" (where drivers follow students all the way from the sidewalk to their cars in order to snatch a space) and instead just park my car in the first space I find and walk. I mean it's nice Florida weather, not Svalbard. *
I'm a student, and the worst people are those who arrive on campus 2 minutes before their classes start, and have their late-stress turn them into giant dicks. I have an 8 am class four days a week, so four days a week I get a prime parking spot on the first floor of the parking garage, right across from the door to the rest of the buildings on campus, because I am one of the first people on campus. I leave between 11 and noon most days, and this is usually when the parking lot is at it's most full. I should note that even at this time, there are still spots to be had on the 3rd and 4th floors of the parking garage, which has an elevator if you're too lazy to use the stairs and it is connected to the other buildings on campus, so you don't even really have to go outdoors in shitty weather. However, without fail, the minute I walk out of the doors towards my car, I have someone stalking me ready to take my spot. All I do when I get into my car is plug in my iPhone for music, set it to play a playlist, and then pull out. Normally, this isn't a big deal. Apparently, this 30 seconds of getting settled in my car was too long for the impatient, lazy dick waiting for my spot, so he laid into his horn. Literally hit his horn and refused to let up. I turned and looked at him and he was giving me the finger and screaming at me to move, to the point his face was red. This was where I passive-aggressively sat there for another minute, trying to figure out what song I wanted, making sure I was buckled in, checking all my mirrors, and anything else to stall actually pulling out. Look, you want my spot? That's fine, but I'm not on your fucking time-table. I'm not taking some unreasonable amount of time, here. Getting situated and turning my iPhone to music takes all of 30 seconds, tops. Plus, I'm leaving, which means I have all the time in the fucking world to sit around if you're a giant dick. You're showing up late to class and are pissed because the prime parking spot you wanted had someone who took an extra couple of seconds to get situated before pulling out? Go fuck yourself, get to campus earlier or go park further away and run so you're not late.
That is almost worse then stealing a spot. In that situation, I would have most definitely decided that I needed to eat lunch on campus or realized that I left behind something very important in that classroom. While giving a condescending wave as I left my car.
I work Loss Prevention at a major retail store at a local mall and by far the worst I've seen is triple parking (pulling into a spot and making a line of 3 cars, that blocks the middle car in). I've had to tell (mostly fat white females and their 5 fat kids) to move as I watched them block someone in, they always sigh and act like I ruined their day. Fuck them, have some respect for other people.
Last summer I caught a ride with a friend to a local festival. There was beer, there were scantily clad girls (most of whom I'm going to hell for being within visual distance of, Ohio has a serious problem with pre-pubescent whores), and gambling. Oh, and it was being held at a church. Yeah, I thought the same thing. Moving back to relevancy, I wasn't yet 21 and couldn't drink, so my friend agreed to let me take his truck, and he would catch a ride later. Now, the area we had parked in was a very large gravel lot. Hundreds of cars had parked, without any kind of markers or lines, just like you would in a fully marked and paved lot. I was amazed that so many people could park in an area without committing acts of stupidity that would threaten a rational person's belief in human intelligence. Of course, there is always an exception, and that exception happened to have triple parked right behind my buddy's truck. This idiot had pulled in right behind me, where there was clearly no way for me to pull out. The ass half of the offending vehicle was clogging the driving aisle, and on top of that the driver hadn't even pulled in straight, so they had taken the space to their right as well. I wanted to key the fuck out of that car. I considered slashing a tire. Instead, I asked the rent-a-security if they could page for the offending idiot. Two guys came to incredulously look at it; one of them looked at me as if I was playing a prank, as if maybe I had somehow wedged the truck in there to fuck with them, because there was no way someone could be so fucking stupid as to block another car in like that. So they page, and we wait. They page again, and still we wait. While inspecting the dealer tags (this car had been bought the day before) to see how easily I could remove them to a nearby trash can, I saw a realtor sign in the back with a phone number. I suggested to one of the security guys that we could call the number and at least leave a message not-so-politely offering an opinion on how much dick had been sucked to obtain a driver's license. Finally, they said fuck it. I started the truck up, and after ten minutes of weaving and moving back and forth a few inches at a time, I was able to pull out with a clearance of about 1/2" between the idiot's bumper and mine. As for spot stealing, my apartment complex doesn't have assigned parking. There IS designated visitor parking, but since it's only on one side of the complex and no one can be arsed to walk fifty feet from their car, tenants tell their friends to park wherever, leaving other tenants shit out of luck. The volume of cars wouldn't even be an issue, except that every idiot in this complex seems to think they need six feet of space between their vehicle and the next one over. This means that ten cars take enough spots for twice that number. I can't count how many times I've come home from work, seen an open spot, and had to slam on the brakes because the space available is two feet less wide than I need. I understand that with snow everywhere and no major plowing, the line markers are hard to see. That's why God made us smarter than the fucking monkeys. Or maybe he didn't, because I'm sure some of those trained chimps could parallel park quicker and better than most people can normal park.
My old house was the last one on a dead end street in a crowded area. With parking in short supply, I'd occasionally come home to cars illegally parked at the end, in such a way that they blocked my driveway. For the most part it wasn't a problem. I just parked right up behind them. I wasn't really going anywhere for a while. And neither were they. /toughguy
Denver and especially Boulder have serious parking problems. I felt bad for anyone who had to commute to school because parking at CU is brutal and the parking Nazis take their job seriously. Thankfully I always lived within walking/biking distance. There is one thing I've never understood. Why get so angry over parking? You don't own a spot, the person who has the spot you want doesn't owe you anything so sitting impatiently does you as much good as punching yourself in the balls. I mean both piss you off and both don't do you any good. I am an impatient person by nature, its something that I really have to work on, but when it comes to parking I find it much simpler to not to stalk parking spots but to calmly find an open spot that I don't have to compete for. But like I said, I lived in Boulder. If someone parked in my reserved spot (say on the Hill) there were repercussions. I never called the towing company and I never left a note on the windshield. Instead I found a happy spot somewhere in the middle.
My dad used to say jokingly that he was going to go to the mall during busy times (like Christmas) and try to snag prime spots and then sell the spot to someone waiting for $5 or whatever. And if they didn't want to pay, then he would just sit there. He never did it, and I'm not sure it would even be worth it, but it's not the worst idea.
How timely... I live in an old house that was turned into apartments. On the one side of the house lives a couple who I rarely see or interact with. However, they are the type that shoveled out their parking spaces on the public street we live on, and will put something in the space to save it. My boyfriend occasionally stays over on weekends, and most people in my building are familiar with his car. On Saturday, morning, he came out to his car to find a note on it saying, "IF YOU DO NOT LIVE IN THIS HOUSE, DON'T PARK IN FRONT OF IT". After he left that morning, my downstairs neighbor promptly moved her car to where his was parked. I find this type of behavior to be absolutely ridiculous and uncalled for. First of all, don't be a little bitch and leave a note. If you wanted him to move his car, fucking knock on my door and ask him. Oh, what is that? You're too much of a pussy to actually talk to someone face to face? You need to write a note?? We live on a public street. People can park WHERE EVER THEY WANT. What's worse is that this couple also has part of a driveway in the back of their side of the house. If you have such a problem parking your car on the other side of the street and walking your lazy ass across to your apartment, maybe you should re-evaluate your priorities.
Parking in Washington, DC is the biggest reason I love having a motorcycle. I've never had to park more than a block away from anywhere I want because I only need about 4' of parking space to fit my bike. I've also never paid for parking. Worst comes to worst, if there's no parking available, I can find somewhere to illegally park where the bike is tucked out of everyone's way and doesn't bother anyone. It's great.
On home game weekends at UA, RVs weren't allowed on campus before about 5pm on Fridays (I think, may be getting the time wrong). There were some parking lots that had to be cleared of student cars, but the one I typically used did not, and so for a little while it would be mixed car/RV, as cars started to leave and RVs would pull in. And, since the RVs never leave, it would eventually become all RVs, no cars. About 1-2 days before the RVs could park, they would start living up at a designated point off campus, and then Friday mornings, people would take orange cones and folding chairs and start marking their territory in the parking lot. Keep in mind, they're not allowed to park yet. Whenever I'd have occasion to come to campus on a Friday, I would make sure to park my car in the spot someone had tried to save, just to see the pissed off look on their faces. It didn't occur to me until after I graduated that we could have gone in Thursday night when it was empty, park 3-4 cars together, and then either walk to campus or carpool, and sell the area we'd blocked off. Prime RV spot on the UA campus? That could have gone for at least $100. Probably $200 on big weekends.
I don't mind spot thieves, relatively speaking, but the idiots who are too lazy/stupid to pull into a space properly and end up taking two parking spaces are the assholes who really piss me off. Whenever I see this in the ramp I park in the offender usually gets a note on their windshield asking them to learn to park straight. Call it passive-aggressive if you want (it isn't) but my only other recourse would be to wait around for who knows how long until the person came to leave and then chew them out then. Part of me wishes I owned a parking ramp so I could ticket/tow the fuckers who do this.