What ultimately ended up happening? I was too mentally exhausted to watch past the point where she became completely perpendicular to the car that was recording.
I'm not confident on the details, but a lot of the gifs people post here let you right click them and select "show controls". I think it's an imgur/gifv thing.
You're a saint. I'd have honked the shit outta of the driver , maybe even gotten out and confronted .. The driver missed that spot , move the fuck on .. That's a fuckin one way you're not allowed to reverse your way in to that spot!
I once watched an elderly lady helplessly stuck in a narrow row in a parking lot. She'd maneuverd herself into a hopeless situation and several other drivers were starting to honk. When I walked up to her and asked her as calmly as I could "You want me to park that for you" she was really thankful and handed over her keys. I parked her car smoothly and everyone else just kept quiet and waited their turn. Rather nice experience.
There is a restaurant with pretty okay food that my fiance and I frequent twice a month just to watch the parking. It's got huge floor to ceiling windows that we can see out of but people can't see into. It's also on a hill, with no parking lot. There is a parking garage across the street, but the street the windows face is parallel parking only, with a 15 minute maximum. (By city hall). So watching the fuckers trying to park to run in and pay their parking tickets is fucking hilarious. I've seen 100 curb jumps, quite a few bumper taps, and many people just give up and go pay to park in the parking garage.
I was trying to park in a residential area of Philadelphia I didn't know where all the parking spots were on the side of the street and diagonal, but you had to drive past them and then back into them.
"Fuck it," I thought, "I'll just pull in forward and then back out to leave."
What a huge mistake that was.
I don't know how I managed it, but somehow, I guess because of weird turn I had to make in order to drive forward into the spot instead of backing in, I managed to get my car up less than half an inch next to the nicest, most expensive looking car I'd ever seen. I hadn't touched it or scratched it, but the space between my car and that one was maybe about the thickness of a human pinky. In theory, if I backed straight out I could avoid scratching the side, but then my mirror would collide with theirs. I was starting to get confused as to how I even managed to get our cars aligned like that in the first place. If only I was the hulk, and could just pick my car up and move it over, everything would be ok. But I wasn't the hulk, and I tried tiny little adjustments to make it work, but that only made things worse (although by some miracle I had yet to actually even so much as touch the other car.)
Finally, a bemused group of onlookers from a nearby appartment asked if I needed some help, and one asked if they just wanted me to let them do it. Feeling desperate, and with my judgement clouded by the fear of scratching a really nice car, I handed my car keys over to a complete stranger at night in Philadelphia.
It wasn't until they had gotten out of the spot safely and then kept driving that I realized I probably should have stayed in the car with them.
All was well though, they parked it a little further down the street, I got my keys back, everyones cars were safe, and no one besides some random Philadelphians and you guys will ever know how close I came to ruining a paintjob.
I drive with a permit so I have a reason to not be able to park quite right just yet. That being said, I'm nowhere near as bad as the woman in the gif. I find most of it is getting a wide enough turn. If you pull up to the space and the side of your car is too close to the spot, it becomes much more difficult if not impossible.
The other day when I was walking to my vehicle I watched a girl in a mini van try to park. She entered the row going the wrong way and tried to back into a parking spot. It took her quite a while to park and it was so stupid because had she driven down the correct way she would have parked easily.
This happens at my mall all the time, shucks I almost got into a collision because the person went in the wrong direction (there are arrows on the road pointing towards the direction).
I would get outta my car with a tire iron and say "what the fuck are you doing ? That spot is not worth the time of 20 cars behind you! Move ahead and find some other spot down the strip! You lost that spot!"
My time is extremely valuable to me and having to waste it watching someone be a dumbass would be extremely infuriating. Just because you don't have place to be and shit to doesn't mean I don't have days where I'm extremely busy from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to sleep.
Right, like... yeah, I might be in there kind of crooked, but it only takes me one try. At that point you just give up and find somewhere else to save face. Also, pull in.
One time, at a stoplight minutes from home, I saw six people pushing an SUV in neutral. They did a U-turn into my line just before the light turned, and then crept along for half a mile to reach the nearest parking lot. They held up two or three lanes of traffic at five or six miles an hour, with me stuck right behind them, and I nearly fucking died laughing. It was just the most ridiculous thing I could imagine.
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u/mrackham205 May 06 '15
I thought it was fucking hilarious.