Parking difficulties
Parking at school has always been troublesome.
Back when I lived in James, I had to worry about how far the available parking spots were from the building. See, parking spots were rare and valuable in James. Sometimes I would be forced to go to the parking lot in Langmir instead. Other times, I’ve had to go all the way to Benedict.
Of course, there are the parking permits. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the system, we are required to have parking permits for our cars, which expire every year on the 30th of September. So, eventually, my parking permit expired. I, however, was too lazy to renew it. Thus, I now had to find parking spots that faced a forest or wall or something. I do this in the hopes that the cops are too lazy to actually check to see if my permit was valid, therefore satisfied with just seeing the back of the permit.
Recently, my car has been acting up. Ever since I got it back from the shop a month ago or so, it has been reluctant to switch gears. Initially, it had trouble reversing, taking a couple of seconds before it finally got into the reverse gear. Also, it had trouble switching to the third gear. I had to go to a very high speed on the second gear until it finally popped into third gear. Ah, the joys of an automatic transmision.
That was true, up until about a week or two ago. Now, my car just won’t go into either of those gears. On the highway, my car is screaming for mercy as it is forced to go at 50 miles per hour in second gear. It simply does not reverse.
Now, that presents a very interesting problem when it comes to parking. I have two solutions to this problem, so far. One solution is to find two spots that were free and were facing each other. This required a larger parking lot, typically found only in malls, and a rarity in dormitory parking lots.
The other solution involves befriending gravity. I would find parking spots that are on a slant, so that gravity can pull the car out of the spot. I could, conceivably, back up into a spot instead, so that I just need to drive forward and out of the parking spot. However, there’s the problem with the expired parking permit.
Sometimes, I would be lucky, and gravity would pull the car out when I put the car into neutral. Other times, I was not. The other night, for example, I had to have my friends repeatedly slam their bodies back onto their seats, using inertia to push the car back. We even had to count, “one, two, three!” and synchronize ourselves, for maximum force. That worked for a bit, but not when the car needed to make a turn back. Then, we tried having my friend in the passenger seat and I open the car doors and push the car back with our feet. That worked for about two inches. Finally, two of my friends got out and just pushed my car out. The guy in the car next to ours looked very confused, and decided to help these two girls out a bit. After the three of them pushed the car out, we were able to move forwards and proceed to watch Harry Potter.
Yesterday morning, we had the same problem when Eric and I went to IHOP. I drove around the IHOP for a bit, but all the parking spots sloped in the wrong direction. Finally, toward the back, there were a couple of spots that sloped the right way, and seemed to slant enough for my car to roll out. After we finished eating, though, we were proved wrong.
It was raining, so neither of us wanted to go out. However, we still needed to go. So, we first tried the good old inertia-is-our-friend trick. That didn’t work. Then, we tried opening the car doors slightly and kicking the car back. That worked alright, except for the fact that the floor was slippery from the rain.
So there we were, two fools inside of a car that couldn’t back up, feet pathetically slipping as we kicked the car back. I kept watching for cars to see if they were coming our way, but luckily, there were none. Eventually, we pushed the car far out enough for me to drive out of the parking lot. Eric laughed his ass off the whole time. The worst part was realizing that there were a thousand other parking spots that were empty and facing each other at the mall, which would have prevented this dilemma in the first place.
And that, girls and boys, is my story of the day.