Taking The Hard Road
So this happened earlier today and was too perfect to not share. I work in construction as the foreman for a new house build. The location is kind of strange; the house is 250 feet up a hill via a footpath only. All of our materials have to come up this footpath by hand. It’s a pain in the butt to manually carry, quite literally, an ENTIRE HOUSE up this hill.
One of our saving graces is having the two parking spots on the street at the bottom of this hill marked with official No Parking signs. Unfortunately, there is an elementary school about half a block away and the parents of children seem to regularly (at least twice a day) think it’s ok to park in our spots. Now I consider myself a reasonable person, so if someone is parked in the spots and we don’t have a delivery or a need to park a truck, I will let it go.
If we need the spots and there’s someone parked there, however, I will ask them to move nicely and most of the time they do so immediately. Until today. I get a phone call from the lumber delivery truck that is en route to our location. He says he’ll be there in about two or three minutes. I let him know I will meet him on the street and make sure he has space to park.
He’s carrying all of the material to frame the roof of our house, which is a lot of really big lumber and will take easily an hour to bring up the hill, so naturally, I didn’t want him parked in the middle of the street with his hazards on for an hour when we have a perfectly good parking spot for him. As I begin my trip down the hill, I notice there is a school parent sitting in her car idling.
Assuming she’s just waiting to pick up her child, I walk up to her car and politely let her know that she is parked in a no-parking zone and we really need her to clear it to park a delivery truck. She scoffs at me and rudely states back, “I’ll just be a few minutes, and your truck isn’t here, take a chill pill dude.” Before I can respond, a giant lumber truck comes around the corner and I wave to him and then gesture towards him to the woman in the car…who has now put her window back up to ignore me.
Oh, it’s on, lady. I put on my best customer service smile and wave at her through the window. She put it down halfway and angrily shouts “WHAT!” By now the truck has pulled up alongside her car and I politely ask her again, with a stronger tone of voice, to move her vehicle, reminding her that she is parked in a tow-away zone. Then she gives me this wonderful idea.
She says, “Can’t you guys just unload around me? Jesus, it’s not that hard.” I give her another smile and walk away, a brilliant plan forming in my head. I instruct the delivery driver to park as closely to her as possible and block her in with the porta potty that is at one end of our reserved spots and the parked car that is parked just adjacent to our spots on the other end.
He smiles because he immediately gets what I’m trying to do, and proceeds to expertly block this lady and her car into a little two parking spot area. We unstrap the lumber and my guys begin humping material up the hill, meanwhile I call the parking enforcement to let them know the situation. At this point in time, I wasn’t trying to get her in trouble, I just wanted a record of why we were blocking part of the street so we don’t get in trouble with the city.
The very friendly traffic officer lets me know that she can be there in about 30 minutes and deal with the situation for me, wonderful! As we continue to unload lumber the child of the parent shows up, and wouldn’t you know it Mom is just now realizing that the lumber truck is parked so close she can’t get out of her driver’s door to meet her kid. What followed was so, so sweet.
She awkwardly clambers across the inside of her car and stumbles out the passenger door, shooting glaring looks at me and the truck driver in the process. She loads her kid into the back and then begins to realize that she has no way of leaving. She comes storming up to me and the driver and states, “I’m in a big hurry, you need to move your darn truck right now so I can go.”
Before I can respond, the driver gets a grin on his face and says, “Ma’am in order to unload the lumber on the truck we had to unstrap it, and per our company policy I’m not allowed to move the truck with any unsecured load on it. Sorry.” This sends her into near aneurysm levels of blood pressure, meanwhile I can barely contain my laughter. “Screw your policy, I have somewhere to be!” She barks back at him.
At this point, with impeccably convenient timing, the parking enforcement officer shows up and parks behind the truck. She doesn’t see the officer arrive and while the officer is still getting out of her vehicle, I have the perfect reply. I just casually say, “Can’t you just pull out around it? It’s not that hard.” With the biggest grin I’ve ever had, I watch as she realizes that I just used her line on her.
“Screw you!” She yells, and storms back to her car and angrily clambers back in through the passenger door and into the driver’s seat. At this point, the officer is walking up to me and the driver. Before she can even introduce herself, the Mom in the car slams it into reverse and stomps on the gas, crashing into our porta potty and knocking it over.
She then throws the car into drive and tries to mount the curb and drive on the sidewalk. The officer, driver, and I are staring in disbelief as she gets halfway over the curb and gets stuck. I can hear her screaming over the idling truck from inside her car. The officer promptly walks up to the door of the car and orders her out. Here comes my favorite part of the entire thing.
I watched her face go to shock as she realized she just did all of that in front of an officer. She gets slapped in cuffs as the parking officer calls for a second unit and she is promptly sat on the very curb she tried to drive over. She sits on the curb yelling to the now two officers about how we told her she could stay there and that we never asked her to move.
The traffic officer responds that she was the one who was originally called when she first refused to move and that she already knows what’s going on. While myself and the driver are giving a report to the second officer, my guys finish moving the remainder of the lumber and the driver finishes his statement and takes off to go back to the yard.
By the end of the ordeal, she was charged with Child Endangerment (her kid was in the back of the car the whole time), Reckless Driving, Destruction of Property, (the porta potty), and Driving on a Suspended License (surprise!). On top of all that she also got her car towed. The kid went home with his grandma and she went to spend some quality time in a cell.
I never expected her to actually heed my advice to “Just pull out around it.” But I think next time she’ll probably think twice about parking in a tow-away zone…if she ever gets a license again.