Marking your territory
You might be familiar with this battle. Every time I pull into the parking lot outside my apartment, it begins anew.
It’s nasty. A veritable fight to the death.
And unlike an out-and-out modern physical war (which everyone knows is fought with online video games), this fight is close. Right in my face, actually.
The challenge: how close can I park to the cars on each side of me?
It’s a mind game. Actually, it’s more than that. It taps into the deep, primal instinct to mark territory.
And that’s why, every time I begin pulling into my spot, my heart starts pounding, my pupils dilate and, somewhere in my head, I fight the urge to leap out and put orange cones all over the place.
“Aha!” I think to myself. “She (the person who parks to my right) is here. She is parking closer today. She probably thinks I’ll never make it into my spot. Well, she’ll PAY for her insolence, by golly. I’ll park so close to her, she’ll never get her door open again! A-HA-HA-HAHA-HAH!”
“Oh, no,” my civilized side will cut in. “That’s not very nice of you, you’re just being paranoid... and crazy.”
I go back and forth on this issue for a while and end up inching in and out of the space for several minutes until I hear both the voices in my head arguing at the same volume. If they’re both unhappy, I must be right in the middle.
It’s just as well. My depth perception being what it is, I probably couldn’t properly park the car between neighbour-lady-to-the-right and the truck-on-my-left if they were blocks apart. It only adds to the sense of danger when you don’t really know what constitutes too close or too far.
The constant jockeying for who gets an extra inch or two in our tootight perpendicular parking spots goes back a while. In my last apartment, I parked just to the left of a loading zone. There was always a little extra room to move. Then the neighbours from H-E-doublehockey-sticks moved in and parked right beside me, on my left.
Suddenly, I would come home and find them parked halfway over my spot.
Soon, it turned personal. They did it over and over again, and I retaliated by parking closer and closer to the line between us when they weren’t home. Suffice to say, when I moved to my next apartment and my new landlord put me beside an empty spot, I wondered if she had heard about the last place.
I’m not sure where these crazy obsessions come from, but I have one theory: the doors. My last car was a four-door. Yep, a nice quadruplet of nice small doors, accessible anywhere, even in small spaces.
But now, my two-door car needs more side room to get the doors open.
And I’ll tell you something: those doors were not designed by a woman.
The doorframe curves in at the top, right at chest height, if you get my drift. And the door, which is heavy, likes to swing shut without warning.
Since I have no plans to charge admission to people who like to watch me violently ricochet back into my seat as the door attacks (I hope you’re drawing a mental picture of this), I try to park with several feet of door space to my left.
And in case that doesn’t work, several feet of door space on my right.
Is the world out to get me? The answer appears to be yes. You see, I have a new parking neighbour... one with a giant 4x4 truck.
You can message Rhonda by logging on to www.shiftweekly.com and clicking the contact link. Wheelbase Media is a worldwide provider of automotive news and feature stories.