Overflow

I came in to work later than normal, so good parking spaces (read: spaces from which the walk to the door doesn’t cause you to sweat all over your fresh work clothes) are harder to come by. But, being a cautious optimist, I always make a drive-by of the good spots before I head out toward BFE to park my car.

What I saw when I rounded the corner filled me with indignance — a car had parked over the line between the *two best spaces* in that section of the lot! Imagine the nerve of this guy! I’ve seen arrogant jerks park their fancy cars that way to avoid getting dings in their precious overpriced automobiles, but this was some beater of a Toyota Tercel! I could only imagine what depths of assholery could persuade a person to park like that!

So once I pulled into my (much farther out) parking space, I whipped out a pad of sticky notes I use for general note leaving purposes and wrote the following:

“In the future, please try not
to take up the best two (2) spaces
left to park with your one (1) car.
Thanks.”

Brilliant. It was measured — a generally polite rebuke — with just enough sarcasm to make the person feel just bad enough to mollify my indignance.

And so I walked toward the door of my place of employment, note in hand, planning to make a stop by the offensively parked beater and give the driver a single-serve helping of homemade humble pie.

What I saw made me end up having to eat my own damn humble pie.

As I approached the car, I saw the back tire. Flat. Some poor slob was probably just lucky to get the car into a parking spot at all. I imagined some person pushing his car in the dark, alone, no spare, and no one to help him.

And I’ve been there before myself. I’ve made a driving career out of driving beaters. I know what it’s like being stranded with a car that’s crapped out on you. And I imagine that if I had pushed my car all the way from the street into a parking spot and noticed, after wiping the sweat from my eyes, that I had accidentally pushed my car over the line, I’d have said “Oh to hell with that.” (or something stronger) to the prospect of backing the thing up and parking it correctly.

Still would have been nice had he done that. But it was harder for me to be indignant about it. In fact, I felt very foolish at being indignant in the first place, standing there holding my little childish note. So much for being “spiritual.” So much for compassion. Some good all this meditation is doing me, huh? Well, it probably just means that I need to keep praying and prepare to eat more humble pie.

So now I’m at my desk, having a little coffee to wash down my pie. Otherwise, it’s been a good morning.