About once a week lately, some person feels compelled to park a car so as to block part of my driveway. They see about half a legal parking space there and I guess they figure half-a-space is better than nothing…so they pull into it even though it means the rear 50% of the vehicle is situated across my driveway, right in front of my garage door.
I don't quite understand why they do this. Even if they don't care about causing inconvenience to the homeowner, even if they're willing to risk a ticket, you'd think they might worry about someone denting or scraping their auto in order to get out of that garage they're half-blocking. I guess it's some sort of calculated gamble…and so far, they seem to be getting away with it. Four times now, counting yesterday afternoon, I've phoned the police and asked them to have someone come by and issue a violation. Four times now, the person has returned to their car and departed before the law arrived.
Yesterday, I was leaving on some errands when I found a beige Hyundai where a beige Hyundai shouldn't have been. I went back inside, called the gendarmes, then went out to my car and executed a very awkward, difficult manuever to back out of my garage. I had just cleared the offending Hyundai when a scowling looking woman walked up and got into it. I pulled up beside her, rolled down my passenger window and called to her. "Please don't ever park like that again" is what I said. What I got back was a torrent of anger and language that would offend a Tourette's patient. I couldn't make all of it out but the gist seemed to be that a lot of sick, evil people had done a lot of sick, evil things to her over the years so she had every right to park wherever she wanted.
There didn't seem to be a lot of value to continuing the discussion…and since I was starting to block traffic, I wished her good luck with her Anger Management courses and drove off.
I don't have a punch line to this story. It's tempting to make one up ("…and then I realized that woman was Condoleezza Rice!") but there was nothing funny about the woman's rage. She was livid about something — too livid to take the time to find a whole parking space, too livid to apologize for blocking my driveway. I don't know what she'd have done if she'd come back twenty minutes later and found a citation on her car. Probably shot someone.