This post is going to be all about handicapped parking spaces and their abuse by myself and others. Yay! So yeah, ok, I sometimes park in handicapped spaces… much to Jenny’s chagrin. However, I only do that when I know I’m going to be 30 seconds (dumping mail off at the post office drop box) or when the entire parking lot is a ghost town and I’m being a lazy ahole (and typically there are other open spaces available right in front of the place). Lots of people get flustered about this because they think it makes me some kind of monster, and maybe to a degree it does… but nothing like the people I saw last weekend.
One thing I would never do however is take up a space when the parking lot is actually busy… and I would never abuse an actual handicapped parking privilege even if I had a placard or state issued handicapped license plate.
A couple days ago I was sitting the in middle of chaos. I was waiting in the car for Jenny as she finished gift shopping and just observing the parking situation across the way. All these box stores decided to glom together in a very odd arrangement. The side streets connecting them are not straight, they curve every-which-way. The parking lot perimeters curve to match, so when you’re trying to pull out it’s really hard to tell if someone is coming straight for you or they are just driving around in the parking lot on the other side of the foot wide strip of grass.
So anyway, as I sat there I watched people driving around like sharks/vultures looking for parking spaces… except for a few a-holes who just breeze in and take the handicapped parking spaces. What really pisses me off about people that park in these spaces when everyone else is circling and circling is that invariably they literally jump out of their cars and happily skip into the store. WTF?! That day it was no different.
The Lexus driver on the left parked, hopped out, and walked not to the nearest store, but all the way the fuck across the parking lot to the store on the complete other side! Then a truck pulled in to the space next to her with a state issued handicapped license plate. Out popped two people and their little toy dog and they all walked into Best Buy. Then a van swooped into the last handicapped spot and a mom and her daughter jump out and the kid actually runs into the store with her mom hurrying behind her… all smiles.
So who’s the biggest a-hole here? The Lexus driver who takes a space for one store and hoofs it a quarter mile to a completely different store, the truck people with the license plate, or the van people who went running into the store? The answer is simple; the truck people are the biggest a-holes.
The biggest a-holes I've ever seen
Don’t get me wrong, they are all a-holes for taking spaces obviously meant for people who CAN’T WALK THAT WELL OR AT ALL, which is especially insidious when there are no other spaces available except for two parking lots over. The reason the truck driver is the biggest a-hole of them all is quite simply the fact that he is not only taking advantage of a limited resource without actually needing the parking space, he has also gone to extreme lengths to burden state taxpayers by actually obtaining a state issued license plate in order to commit his abuses.
When a parking lot is nowhere near full, sure, use your placard or license plate to park your lazy ass in front of the store. A person like this or this can easily park right next to you or use another handicapped space. But when the parking lot is absolutely full and vultures are circling, don’t give me a reason to walk up behind you with a machete and MAKE you handicapped you fucking pieces of shit.
Good topic, Amal. I wrote a similar post recently, though my take is somewhat more offensive… http://jessesucks.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/hot-rod-handicapped/
Hahah holy crap! Batman is handicapped!?
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