Parking Parallels

I am one of those people who like slap-stick comedy.  Pratfalls, mishaps, and other goofiness always make me giggle, and I absolutely love potty humour.  I’m not grossed out so easily, and I can roll with the worst of them when it comes to locker talk and sailor-blushing cussing.  I have unabashedly laughed at some awful jokes, relished in self-deprecating potshots, and raised more than a few eyebrows over the years with my words.  Among my favourite comedians are the Monty Python crew, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Dennis Leary, Gilbert Gottfried, and more recent comics such as Eddie Izzard, Patton Oswalt and David Cross.  They lay it all out there, and they aren’t afraid to poke fun at anything or anyone, because they understand comedy.  The great Will Rogers once said, in so many words, that if you can’t make fun of yourself, you can’t make fun of anything.

It is with that that I introduce this next diatribe, because like anything, you have to have a context to fully appreciate the big picture.  I was recently invited to a Facebook group called “You park like an ***hole”.  My first instinct was to be offended, because I think I can park my car just well as the next guy.  Okay, so I have a Grand Caravan, and sometimes it feels like parking a yacht, but I do my best.  I even take the extra few seconds to straighten out so others don’t think I park poorly.  Then, I saw the cover photo, and laughed out loud.  I refuse to say LOL; I’m not willing to lay claim to the modern leet-speak generation just yet, IMHO.

The premise is simple, but brilliant.  Take pictures of examples of bad parking and post them on the website.  The internet is great for connecting people of like-interests, and this is another example of building a community online; people who are fed up with parking villains can have some small semblance of revenge by snapping a quick pic of the perpetrators, and with the click of a button or two they can be ridiculed for all to see on Facebook, as in this case.  What’s great about it is that you are practically anonymous.  It is highly unlikely that anyone who parks badly will ever see the evidence of their social crime on that Facebook group.  You would have to do some pretty deep digging to find out who’s license plate that is on the Dodge Ram parked at forty-five degrees across two spaces.  The guy (or gal) who parked that beast half-cocked probably didn’t even realize what they had just done.  There is a lot to read in parking like that; I like to think it’s like reading tea leaves in a garage frame of mind.

Let’s back it all up, and look at it from the highest vantage point.  Parking is a skill.  We have to learn it to pass the driver’s test, and that includes the dreaded parallel parking test.  You got three chances, or you did when I was sixteen stressing over my first of two road tests before I got my beginner’s permit.  You have to practice, preferably in a non-threatening area, like maybe with pylons or chalk lines, and someone you can trust not to back-seat drive or intimidate you.  You have to use your mirrors, have a feel for the size of the vehicle, and develop that intangible comfort zone you have to develop to be able to drive and park.  That’s the frustrating part about helping to teach someone to drive.  It’s like teaching patterns in Math; as an adult, you just ‘get’ it, but the kids often do not.

People love their trucks.  I can’t understand why you would want one unless it was something you knew you would use daily, either for work or leisure.  They guzzle gas, only fit a few people, and cost more overall, so I couldn’t imagine buying one personally.  I had an old quarter-ton for a few months, and I used it a handful of times, but my vans have served me infinitely more adequately.  Either way, they are bigger than most cars, and therefore need more practice if you want to park them properly.  The problem seems to be that most people that park poorly are aware that they are doing so.  To me, that makes me think that either that driver is too lazy to take those extra few seconds to straighten out, or what is more unsettling and possibly indicative of a disturbing new trend, they simply don’t care.  That means they deliberately leave their vehicle parked that way, and they couldn’t care less what the rest of us think.

If you park a car (of any sort) across two clearly marked parallel lines, you have a responsibility to back up, reposition your vehicle, and park it between the marked lines so that others can park as well.  If everyone does it properly, there would be, in most cases (unless you are at UNB) enough parking for everyone.  Sometimes you don’t find that ‘sweet spot’, that lucrative piece of parking real estate near the entrance, usually close to the handicapped parking spaces that never seem to have any vehicles in them.  Or the red-painted ‘family’ parking spots, which never made sense to me, since I too have a family that resembles the white spray-painted stick family in the photo.  Or the most recent ‘hybrid’ spots, reserved for hybrid cars.  Now there’s a reason to pay almost double for a new car.  Regardless, you can’t park there folks, so accept it and move on.  Park at the nearest available lane, and be sure you aren’t too far through, sticking out too far, too close to either line so people beside you with groceries can actually access their own car, and for crying out loud, do it straight.

I take great pleasure in taking pictures of people who park like ***holes and posting them on this group.  It sounds frivolous, immature, petty, and just plain silly.  It probably is.  Never will I wait beside someone’s badly-parked car until they come out so I can tell them to their face that they are ignorant and disrespectful to other drivers.  I will never leave a note on their windshield, write with my fingertip in the accumulated dust on their rear window, or otherwise cause a fuss.  I won’t write a letter to the editor, like some cranky old curmudgeon who just waits for a reason to rail on young people today. For those of us who take pictures of parking fails, it’s like our own secret club.  I will do only two things.  First, I will compose this blog entry for The Hole In The Fence, because I hope it will entertain people while conveying a message to which I think most of us can relate.  Second, I can discreetly take pictures and post them online.  Maybe one day the guy who clearly didn’t learn how to park his Silverado will actually see his sins in front of him while complete strangers laugh out loud at his ineptness on a digital soapbox.  Why do we do it?  Because there is something bigger than just a parked car gone awry.  People that just park and walk away are showing their true nature.  If you can’t take a second to make life a little more pleasant for a complete stranger, you are telling the world that you feel you are more important than anyone else.  Your time in that store is more important than the next guy’s.  We are in the midst of a generation of attitude problems.  Service is poor, and people are more arrogant than ever.  Take the time to do the little things right.  Second guess how you park in the same way you would (or should) second guess anything.  That is the real parallel in parking.