O.C.D. in the parking lot

Orangeness 11: Obsessive Compulsive Parking

“Park Prettily,” I read at a car park in England. Nothing pretty about it, Brits.

I am edging back and forth, forward and backward, trying to place my Dorkmobile into a rectangular parking place. Go forward, go backward, turn steering wheel a little bit…Too much! Back up. See those worn-out yellow lines on the asphalt? You need to be 1 foot away from them on both sides. 12 inches, that’s all you get. Open the door and see 9 inches between you and the line. No, that won’t work. Your fellow unpretty parker will open the door and bang a dent into your door. My car is pocked with these mini-dents, there’s no way to avoid them. And I’ve probably doored someone else’s car dozens of times. 

Park Prettily. Back up again. NO WAIT someone is coming down the parking lot alley at high speed (at least for a parking lot) and you can’t see them because you’re in between monster “mini” vans that look like enormous sweet potatoes on wheels. Mine is equally oversized but rectangular and boxy rather than ovoid. The designers of this parking lot did their planning in 1991, when it was built. That sounds like yesterday, but it was more than twenty years ago and cars were not giant vegetables back then. You could actually park in one of their spaces without smacking your neighbor’s car door with yours.

It’s mathematical, trigonometric if you draw the lines carefully. A change of just a few inches as you back up is multiplied into a large arc in the front. You are making parts of a 270-point turn and inscribing an arc that moves along a virtual circle trying to move your wheels sideways while moving forward and backward inch by inch. But those other drivers haven’t stopped, they’re whizzing by in back of you and you can’t see. Ah, but wait, potato driver to your right is stashing her grocery bags in the back of the mobile and she is LEAVING. Time for you to find your wallet (another commercial adventure) and escape. But no, another vehicle whose size dwarfs the blob that just left has pulled up into the space. Not a vegetable, this is the crate the vegetables got shipped in. Let’s see them park prettily.