Parking

There’s a little something I need to rant about. This is nothing new, I’m sure you’ve heard the arguments a million times. Handicap parking. What the hell is wrong with people? But I have a couple new twists for you, from my perspective.

First off,  as you know, I was in Toronto last week at a hospital. I had to stay there overnight for two nights. When I got there, it was mid afternoon and the lot was fairly full. There were no handicap spots to be had. So, as I always do in these situations, I find the farthest possible corner of the parking lot, and I park on an angle across two spots. Then I place my sign, a magnetic sign i had custom made, on the side of my van. It’s bright red and white and it says “WHEELCHAIR RAMP” with a large international wheelchair symbol, followed by “PLEASE DO NOT PARK WITHIN 3M (9 FT)” Then I place my handicap parking permit in the window. All of this ensures that when I get back to my van, nobody will have parked too close to me and made it impossible for me to lower my ramp. Or so you would think. It case it’s not clear to you, I park across two spots to make doubly sure that even a blind person driving their car (apparently there are lots of them) will not block me in even if they don’t see my sign.

Later that afternoon, I went out to my van to see if I could move it to a handicap spot, or even an end spot on one of the rows (with my ramp on the end side) Instead I found  a piece of paper under my windshield wiper. “Great, a ticket” I thought, while wondering how the hell I was going to reach it. I sat there frustrated until an older man on his way to his vehicle was able to help me retrieve it. It wasn’t a ticket. It was note. I scanned it so you can read it yourself:

(click to enlarge)

Now, this person was so bothered by my angled parking in the far corner of the lot, that he took the time to find a sticky note and a pen, write this, and place it under my wiper. Most astonishing is that in a parking lot of a rehab hospital, with a wheelchair sticker on my door and the parking permit in the windshield right under the wiper he had to lift to place the note, and not to mention the fact that I have no driver’s seat in my van, none of this enabled him to figure out on his own why I was parked on an angle. Most aggravating for me is that I had no way of knowing who wrote this  so that I could let them know just how stupid they were.

And then yesterday at work, one of my co-workers approached me to ask if I had called parking enforcement the day before. No, I had not, why? It turns out another co-worker had parked in a handicap spot and got a ticket. Here, in this area, that’s a $350 fine. She gave a whole bunch of excuses why our friend had parked there and then looked to me for a reaction. My response was: “Good. Perfect. ”

She was angry with me, “how can you say that?? She’s a sweet person, she’s our friend! How can you be such an ass about this, that’s a lot of money!!”

Well, in short, do the crime, pay the fine. Plain and simple.

The circumstances are that our parking garage is being worked on; half the decks are closed off. There are not enough spots this week for the amount of cars they have sold permits to. It’s truly a mess. But that doesn’t justify parking in a handicap spot. Sorry. You have 500 spots to chose from, I have 8. If yours are full, sorry about your luck.

What confuses me is why people come to me when they get a Handicap Parking ticket. It’s not the first time it’s happened. It’s as though they think I can pick up the phone and call the handicap society and get them pardoned. “Hello? Yes hi Jim it’s me Syl. How are the kids? Good, good to hear. Listen, my friend here got a ticket for parking in one of our spots, she’s a good kid, she didn’t mean it. Can you take care of that for me? Great, thanks Jim. See you at the meeting next week.”