Back in days of yore when I was young, I was given a disability parking permit for my work car park because I have crohns, and that can cause mobility problems. There were three allocated disability spaces near the door, and only people with permits were allowed to park in them.
In theory.
In practice, if you had a disability permit and didn’t get there early, you wouldn’t get a space, because some entitled person who was late and didn’t want to park at the back of the (admittedly large) car park and walk would always park there.
The worst offender was a guy in my department who thought he was gods gift to the world and was easily the most entitled person I’ve ever met. If someone was going to steal my space, it was him.
Now there was a period where I was arriving a little later than I normally would due to roadworks, and every. Single. Day. I would get in and this guy was parked in my space. Every day, I would inform facilities that someone without a permit was parked in the permit parking.
They did nothing about it, so one day when it was raining, I was running late and was in pain from the beginnings of a flare up, I drove in to see That Guy in my spot… and also two other Not Disabled cars in the other two spots.
I saw red. I parked my car across all three spaces in front of the other cars, and at the time I was rocking an estate car so it was almost big enough to cover all three. As I was getting out of my car, another disabled permit parker pulled up, saw what I had done, and parked next to me. We headed into the building together, not letting on what we had done, and went about our days.
Lunchtime comes, and because it’s raining, people understandably want to use their cars to go get lunch instead of walking. That Guy leaves the office, and returns a minute later.
‘You’ve blocked me in,’ he said.
I put my pencil down and turn to face him. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have, but you’re in my space.’ I picked my pencil back up and went back to my diagram.
That Guy stomps off, and goes to facilities. I didn’t witness the actual exchange, but I was told by a colleague that That Guy lost his mind at facilities for not doing anything about our ‘illegal parking’ and the facilities guy informed him that he was the illegally parked one. This guy was new and the jobsworth we all needed, and he really started to enforce the parking rules.
Yes, it was petty. But it’s still one of my best memories from that job.
