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Lindsay Metcalf
on May 22 2013 - 06:00 AM
When that tornado siren sounds, I'm in the basement
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mara williams
on May 21 2013 - 06:00 AM
Summer break has this mom on a house upkeep war path.
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I'm not one for road rage. No, not usually. This is surprising, considering how much time I spend on the road. But I stay pretty calm. Not a lot bothers me. No road rage here.
But parking lot rage? Oh, parking lot rage is in a class of its own!
Take this afternoon, for instance. My kids' school parking lot has shrunk due to the construction of their new building. I'm okay with that, because the apartment building next door is letting us park in their lot. There's some street parking, also, and there are helpful teachers in orange vests directing traffic. It shouldn't be too bad.
Except that it is sometimes.
Look, people. Look. There are parking spots clearly, CLEARLY marked in the school's parking lot. There are orange cones set up to allow for two, but only two, extra parking spots in the afternoon when it's the craziest. We are lucky to get those two! And those orange cones? They're not just orange. They're bright freaking orange! And you park on the inside of them, not the outside! The inside!
It's not hard. You park in the spots. If there are no spots, you park on the street. If you can't park on the street, you park in the lot at the apartment building next door. Not. Hard.
So why is it that this afternoon, I couldn't get out of the parking lot because people were parked where we are supposed to be able to drive?
It kind of turned in to a thing. I saw the traffic jam right away when Charlotte and I walked out of the building and headed toward our car. There is a nice, wide path for us for which to drive. It's a big one-way loop. But there were two cars parked side by side in the path. Horns were honking and drivers were revving the engines of their cars. It was interesting, to say the least, but surely something that would loosen up by the time we got to our van.
"What exactly is it you want me to do?" I heard a man yell from his car.
"We want you to move your car!" It was amazing. Two different moms in two different cars shouted this in unison. The man was not parked in a parking spot. He was parked in the driving path. Another man was parked in the path next to him, but he wasn't getting involved.
"I am parking here," the argumentative man said. "If you are trying to get out, you can turn your car around and go the other way."
Again, in unison, the moms said "That is not a parking spot!"
Dude. The lot isn't even full. It's almost four o'clock. There are so many parking spots to park in. I'm siding with the moms here.
As his protests were unsuccessful, the man finally pulled his car into one of the vacant spots. The other man stood firm in his illegal parking, but others were able to drive around. I was glad the problem was solved, because it was time for us to go. I backed my van out of its space and headed down the one-way path, only to be met with the exact same situation with not two, but three new cars!
"What is going on?" I shouted out of my van's driver's side window.
That's right. I shouted out the window.
"You can't park here! Seriously!"
I waved my hands in the air and made a scrunchy face. The woman in the car ahead of me needed to understand! I was mad! I had a small child in the car! I was tired! I was hot! And they were not parking properly.
Should I call the school, tell someone in the office? Should I park the car and get out and say something to these rude parkers? Maybe if I inched my car up real close-like, real near to their bumper so our cars are almost kissing each other. Would that get them to move? I didn't know. I just sat in my car and rolled my eyes.
Then, it happened. A car moved. I was free! Free! Free to roam Kansas City in my Town and Country! Free to drive to Sonic and get a slushy! Free to… to… go home!
"Finally!" I yelled, my windows still down. The illegally parked woman was still there, and she saw me. She gave me a look, nice and dirty. And I was enraged.
Yes, enraged. I flew out of that parking lot as fast as I could. I wanted everyone to hear the engine and to see how fast I could go. Don't worry, there were no kids in the lot! No one got hurt. But I had parking lot rage that was so bad, I was taking it out on my gas pedal.
"Mommy, you drive fast," Charlotte said.
Oh. Oops. Time to calm down.
It doesn't happen often. Mostly it happens in mall parking lots, those massive lots they have at Target and such, those awful parking garages down in Power and Light, the lot at the grocery store where people decide they should get to take up two parking spaces because they drive an expensive sports car and they don't want it to get scratched so they take up TWO FREAKING SPACES! Seriously, people? Two spaces?
Okay. Calm down. It'll be alright. I'll just get back on the highway where there's no rage. Just nice and easy driving.
Do you get road rage? Parking lot rage? Bus stop rage? We all have our little frustrations in life that we let get out of hand. I guess parking lots are mine!
The parking lot at the high school drives me bonkers. All those kids coming out of the parking lot out of both both lanes (the entrance and exit lane) and police officers sitting there just letting it happen. Yes, a little rage there. The parking garage at KU Med Center that specifically says "No employee parking" but I am forced to park at the very top, in one of the few spaces left, because employees are parked there. Parking lots are almost worse than the highway during rush hour.I hate parking lots! I will only go into the high school parking lot during off hours. In other parking lots, I do not mind walking just to avoid inconsiderate drivers. I have a nice big ding on my passenger side door thanks to one of these people. No note, just a large, big as daylight ding.Mine has been parking lot rage since Dale was in kindergarten. It always amazed me how perfectly logical decent people could decide they didn't have to follow any student drop off/pickup rules or that they should be first in line, cut in line, make up their own line, and my favorite is parking right in front of the school doors and leaving their car (in a no parking zone) while the rest of us try to figure out how to get around them. Up, parking lot rage it is. Fortunately Dale is now driving and I friggin don't have to deal with it anymore.
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