Awesome (A Word Rarely Used to Describe Parking in San Francisco)
Posted by Moose on December 29th, 2007. Filed under: My Brain Needs a Drink.Parking in San Francisco is an endeavor best undertaken with a sherpa and a fresh loaf of nutritious bread. If someone is lucky enough to have their own spot, woe betide the fiend who poaches it.
I’m generally a nice person. I give money to charity, avoid pushing old ladies, and quietly wait until everyone has exited the Bart train before climbing on. But I’m guilty of the occasional parking misdemeanor. When I lived in the Presidio (where you trade commercial establishments (bars) within walking distance for trees and abundant parking right outside your front door), I once parked in someone’s designated parking space. I know this because when I went out to my car the next morning, there was a note on the windshield telling me I had parked in her designated parking space. “Designated” was underlined three times. I looked to my right. Her car was parked in the spot next to mine. Meaning she wasn’t inconvenienced so much as she was ruffled. Her note was the civilized urban equivalent of peeing on her territory.
I think the general parking attitude in San Francisco stems from apartment living, where you don’t have your own space and are forced to sell your soul on a weekly basis just to walk through your front door after work and eat a frozen pizza already. Between roaming the streets for hours in fruitless, teeth-grinding circles for a place to leave your car, hopping up at 6 a.m. to move your car from its hard won spot for street cleaning, and leaving a monthly allotment in your budget for parking tickets, a person can become understandably bitter.
The next time I infringed on someone’s valuable vehicle real estate, I was blocking the driveway of the house we live in now. It’s a generally accepted practice to block your own driveway if you need a spot, the idea being that you’re not going to call a tow truck on your own damn car. Unfortunately, I was either in a hurry or feeling lazy or generally preoccupied, and the butt of my car intruded on the neighbor’s driveway by a few inches. Not enough to keep them from pulling out, but just enough to make me look like a derelict who may have been raised in a barn. A barn with no parking spots. The next morning I found my second outraged San Francisco parking note, complete with implications as regards to my character and breeding, and, yes, multiple underlines. Nothing compels a San Franciscan to underline possessive personal pronouns like a perceived parking insult.
I try not to hold grudges. (Except for that kid who pushed me into a cafeteria bench in the first grade, cutting my eye so I bled all over my new purple sweatshirt. WATCH YOUR BACK, PAL.) (Though, come to think of it, this may not have been an assisted injury. I may have just tripped.) But, in spite of the exhausting cranial calisthenics required to recall what I ate for breakfast yesterday, I tend to remember things like parking notes. So when I’m at a party, idly following a job discussion with the neighbor who left his opinions regarding my parking ability under my windshield wipers, I can’t help but think, “The PR guy for the Grateful Dead left a nasty note on my car once…. Awesome.”
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December 29th, 2007 at 8:03 am
I can totally relate. Not because I live in San Francisco (unless Michigan got moved while I was sleeping last night) but because this is the parking situation *where I work*. You might think this would be impossible, as any self-respecting employer would presumably want to pay its employees to be in the office working rather than trolling around in teeth-clenching fury looking for a parking space. And yet, it is common practice for people to arrive on campus HOURS early, to lurk in their cars at the end of a parking aisle, and to SLEEP while they wait for someone to pull out and free up a space. (The finely-honed sense of parking availability wakens one immediately in settings of such desperation, apparently.) This is particularly galling because there is also a 600-person-long waiting list for the designated spaces (which one has to pay annual fees of hundreds of dollars for), and yet those spaces are always sitting empty, mocking me, as I am desperately looking for a quantity of pavement I could invent into a parking space.
So this is just to say: the Hell of parking has no city limits. You have my sympathies.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Once upon a time (12-15 years ago?) in a land far, far away (the burbs) a nasty neighbor left a note on a guests car that was parked on the court overnight. Please note everyone on the street has a 3 car garage, an oversized driveway and maybe 2 other cars parked on the street. Parking is NOT an issue.
I wish I had kept the note but it established that this person LOVED the view from their living room window onto the house across the street and our guest was RUDE to park THAT mini-van in front of THEIR home. Frigging renters.
The BEST part was they used the word “parenthetically”. But they misspelled it. So I gladly took a red pen, corrected the word and left the note of their doorstep.
There were no more notes.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I think you might live in New York.
December 29th, 2007 at 10:10 am
The parking issues reminded me of when I lived in Vancouver. Oh, the hours of my life that were wasted circling the block looking for a place to park…
So did you keep the note? You could try and hawk it on eBay
December 29th, 2007 at 10:51 am
This is exactly why John and I don’t go up to the city much! Too frustrating to find parking when you just want to be there for a couple of hours. Frankly, I’m amazed at you who does it every day! And the PR guy? For the Grateful Dead? Really awesome!
December 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
You know, I’ve always been a little jealous of people that could leave notes on cars. Though I find the ones filled with f-bombs to be quite rude.
We have street parking here, though it’s nothing insane like it is in San Francisco or like my friends have it in LA. It does drive me nuts when people park so only one car can fit between driveways or take up two spaces or whatever. But then I remember that it’s kind of passive aggressive and we’ve all had bad days. Doesn’t mean I’m still not grumpy about it mind you
December 30th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Someone once left a note on an ex’s windshield that showed a b&w drawing of mickey mouse shooting the bird with a note that said, “Thanks for parking so close to my f-g bumper, I needed a jackknife to get my goddamn car out, etc., etc.” I was mostly impressed that someone had the forethought to keep photocopied rude messages for just such an occasion. A former boyscout, mayhap?
Anyway, the Dead, really? How kewl.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:34 pm
I, too, live in SF. The best parking note we ever got wasn’t so much a note as a social commentary. My boyfriend parked in our driveway one night when he got home very late and couldn’t find parking after driving around for 30 min. Apparently, someone with a dog was so upset over the the inconvenience of walking around the car into, god forbid, the quiet street we lived on, they left a bag of dog poop on our car. The joys of city living.
December 31st, 2007 at 9:34 pm
All Adither took the words right out of my mouth. This is TOTALLY what parking in NYC is like.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 am
Two things: First, I remember when you got pushed into the cafeteria bench, and no, you did not trip.
Second, is it proper etiquette to share another site you might find of related interest? Perhaps you’ve already been to http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/ but I laugh out loud every time I read the notes…
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Hi…long time no co-rant. My boss once locked her keys in her car with the car still running when taking me out for lunch (it was my last day at work). She had to call a tow-truck service, etc. It was going to cost her a fortune and would mean a one-hour wait. With the car running. And not much gas left. Which might also mean getting the car towed to a gas station.
We decided to have lunch and then come out and meet the tow-truck guy. When we came back out after lunch, someone had left a lengthy note on the dash explaining in great detail how bad excessive car idling is for the environment. So are preachy windbags, in my experience.
Hope all is well and how’s the freelancing going?
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Clearly in one respect San Francisco and my college are alike – they were so busy building pretty things to go into that they forgot about putting in places where one could park to go into the pretty buildings. On a good day I get to park 10-15 minutes away. On a bad day… well, let’s just say that I sure would like to borrow that sherpa from you. When will people learn that if they make something for large amounts of people (a mall, a college, a city, for example) they shouldn’t be surprised when all those people need somewhere to park? If you build it, they will park outside of it. Preferably somewhere within the same county.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I had to laugh at this because the energy it takes to write a NOTE to a stranger and leave it on their car is quite impressive. (And also maybe indicative of a desperate need for hobbies.) Also, I always sort of wonder if those who leave notes are ever discovered mid-windshield-wiper lift.
And what do they say to the car owner, with note in hand, if caught?
January 21st, 2009 at 6:41 am
in The Health Care price Care The Health