Sunday, April 23, 2006

The Perfect Parking Space

I had a rental car this weekend because I had a free day and I needed to get to a friend's going-away-party in Oakland. The bad thing about having a rental car, as opposed to a Zipcar, is that I have to find a parking space for it. This isn't easy for two reasons. First, I live on Nob Hill and there's no parking here. Or there. Or over there. Or over there, either. The other problem is I can't parallel park, so even if a space opens up, unless it's on a block that has horizontal parking, or is a spot I can just pull into, I have to pass it by.

Tonight I started the quest, a quest that in the past has taken me over 90 minutes, but after only 10 minutes of circling, I came across the perfect spot, and only one block from my apartment. Sweet.

On my quest, however, I drove past the above-pictured car, which is proof that there's someone out there who's a worse parker than me. It might also be proof that circling around looking for parking can lead to a certain kind of insanity wherein you eventually think that just pulling onto the curb, even though you have plenty of space behind you (there's no car behind that car, just the entrance to an alley), is good enough.

I really can't fathom how someone could think this was ok. Unfortunately, the picture doesn't do it justice--it's not just the front tire that's on the curb, it's the whole front-end of the car. And that's not a driveway, that's the sidewalk.

The only times I could find a parking job like this reasonable is if the person parking was totally drunk, and really thought they had done a fine job, or if this was the front of a hospital, and a husband had just pulled up on to the curb to get his pregnant wife inside as she was going into labor.

That's not a hospital, and it was only 9:45pm when I first spotted this car, not 3am. So seriously, WTF?!

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