July 26th, 2004
Last week and into the weekend it was hot. Damn hot--at least as far as temperatures in Vancouver go. It was 33 degrees in our living room on Saturday afternoon. That's 91 and a half degrees Fahrenheit.
By the way, wanna convert Fahrenheit to Celsius? Or Celsius to Fahrenheit? Just enter the value in the box for the temperature you know, then click on or tab to the other line.
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Anyhow, I've been getting more and more narked at this trend in the parking lot where I park in the mornings.
People have decided that if they angle their cars, ignoring the direction of the lines, they can get in and out of their parking spaces a little easier. What this has done is made parking around these 1/2-clever-but-thoughtlessly-inconsiderate goofs more difficult for other people. In extreme cases, these trying-to-be-clever parking jobs span enough of another spot that two spots are taken up by one car parked at an angle.
(When I was attending electronics school in Calgary, there was a large parking lot that was seldom more than 1/2-full. Block heaters were somewhat at a premium, but there were always lots of free spaces. So some students started parking their cars across two or three spots. It was almost as though they were engaged in a contest to see how many spaces they could cover with their cars. Well, the most was four, as far as I could see. But then one day I came out after some particularly dreary class--probably learning about Kirchoff's Laws or something similar--and saw a car being towed, most of the other improper-parkers already towed, and tickets on the windshields of the remaining ones. Because I was 18, I laughed out loud with glee.)
But back to the present: I'm pretty sure that people are not parking in this parking lot because of their anti-social, break-the-mold-I-grew-up-in mentality. I just think that they have this innate urge, this yearning, to find a better way to do something and make their lives a small bit easier. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but there is a lot wrong with their ignoring the difficulty they make for other parkers.
And there's one other thing that irritates me: Every day and always in the same place, there is a little silver-grey Toyota Echo parked at such an angle that two spaces are taken up by the car. But the security guards regularly walk by this car and never issue a warning or a ticket! You would think that at some point someone would say, "Well, gee, I guess we should ticket this car for taking up two spaces pretty much every day of the year ..." But, for whatever reasons, they don't.