I need to leave my garage empty for my aunt and I find a fishbone park space in front of my house. It's wide. Very wide. So wide that I think if I parked my little car better, another car could fit beside it. And I'd get some practice. Note carefully: I am on a sidewalk parking, lifted from the main road. I can do all the twisting and turning I want, without disturbing anyone.
Or so I thought!
A woman stops along the road a bit before my place. Note even more carefully: the damn road is a one-way street, but it's NARROW. Two cars barely fit side by side, and just ahead it turns left. Add that I have the deepest possible hatred for people stopping in the road, because it causes accidents as likely as not as two rows of cars try to squeeze into one to avoid the idiot, and just imagine if there's a curve ahead.
So I try to wave at the woman to signify that I'm not leaving the place. She does not see me. She is so hell-bent on getting the parking space that she now begins edging forward until she is almost directly behind me. At that point I open the car door and tell her I'm not leaving. She looks astonished. Why should someone be manoeuvering in a parking place? Making space for someone else? It could be a concept too foreign.
The woman moves, and I am convinced for all the world that she finally decided to go look for another place. Note that there's another fishbone parking on the other side of the aisle, and myriads of parking spaces all around - it's not that easy to find one, but it's not impossible either. Hey, as I found one, she could find one too!
So I continue maneuvering, safe in being on the sidewalk and so away from the road, and I back a little, and thunk, I hit something. I turn around and see the woman STILL behind me, and so close to the sidewalk that I touched her with my back fender even though my wheels were still on the sidewalk!
I get down. "Didn't you look?" "Sorry, but no, honestly, I thought you had gone away!" "You scratched me!" "Fortunately not." "Yes, you scratched me!" "No, I don't think so." She gets down, looks at the car, climbs back on the car without a glance or a word to me. "So did I scratch you?" "No." At that point my niceness is thoroughly exhausted. I close the car and leave. As I leave, I see the woman is STILL there in the road, even though by now it's obvious that place is taken!
Bottom line: now I'm more inclined to understand those who park their car so badly that they take up two places. If this is what one gets for trying to improve it... |