Let me take a moment to talk about something that has nothing to do with movies, web comics or Marlon Brando. This is a little pet peeve of mine and I’m going to use my site as a soapbox for a second.
When you are parking your car on the street near a parking meter, there is a right way and a wrong way to leave your vehicle.
EXHIBIT A
Think of the space between parking meters as a goal post in a football game. Park your car between the goal posts. Put your money in the meter in front of your car. This is the right way to park at a parking meter.
EXHIBIT B
When you park your car directly in front of a meter, you end up taking more space than you should from the spot in front of you. This complicates parking for other motorists, not to mention puts your car door at risk of dings and dents from opening the door into the meter you’ve parked directly in front of. This is the wrong way to park at a parking meter.
If you insist on parking like an effin’ moron, please do not be surprised when someone firebombs your car and you return to a smoldering husk of twisted metal on the street.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Thank you for your insight Tom Brazleton, what spurred you to call everyone to arms about this issue?
When we take Henry to day care each morning, there is always some idiot screwing it up for the rest of us.
My frustration comes from the fact that each day it’s a different idiot.
What you don’t know is that it’s actually ONE idiot who gets there far earlier in the morning than you do, and by the time you get there he has left and everyone else has had to park like an idiot to accommodate that original idiot. In turn, it leaves you having to park like an idiot. So you should probably stake out the day care from somewhere around 3am onward to find the real culprit.. then proceed to firebomb his car.
I think that’s what makes it frustrating. You can’t really fault the guy who is parked like an idiot when you come on the scene because you can’t know for sure if he parked that way intentionally or if some other moron forced him into that situation.
Funny that you bring this up now. I just watched the first two episode of a new show called “Lie to Me” with Tim Roth. In that show he plays a kind of police investigator that specializes in microexpressions. Basically he is really good at reading people.
In one scene in the second episode he’s getting ready to parallel park and a guy in a sweet yellow sports car snags the spot from him. He’s a bit angry by this, so he politely pulls up to the guy who is still in his car, rolls down the window and asks if he saw him there and if he’d kindly move. He can tell the guy is lying, he did in fact see him there, and can tell that he’s telling the truth, the guy doesn’t plan on moving. Tim Roth agrees and simply double parks his car about 3-inches from the driver side door, and gets out to go about his business.
I thought it was a classic dirty move that was so well deserved.
(Jots it down on notepad)
As a guy who’s learning how to drive, thanks for the tip. I’ll make sure to park between two parking meters if possible.
I hate when that happens even when there aren’t any meters. Like you know that if every car would just move up one inch that your car would have no problem fitting what so ever. JERKS. Thats it i’m riding my bike from now on.
John – completely agree. We used to live on a parallel park street and I’d come home to find all this 1/2 car sized gaps… and then wind up having to park three blocks away!
*mutter*
But then, I live in a complex now with a limit of one car per front-space and we still see our neighbors parking all THREE of their vehicles in front of the building and making us have to park across the lot… so it may just be that people in general are sucky.