Campus parking passes at my college could be purchased for either one semester or a full year. One year, I originally intended to study abroad for the spring semester but ended up changing my mind late in the fall. I had a car on campus, and I couldn’t remember if I had bought only the one-semester pass or if I had played it safe and paid for the full year (knowing that study abroad wasn’t guaranteed and that the passes often sold out).

The first thing I did was check my student portal, which showed that my car was registered with the campus police but didn’t have anything about parking. Then, I did the somewhat obvious thing of checking my car windshield, and I realized there was a printed expiration date of May the following year. Awesome, I was all set.

Then, in mid-February, there was a severe blizzard. It started in the late afternoon, and alerts went out that all the cars on campus had to be moved to a specific emergency lot so that the smaller parking lots, dorm driveways, etc., could be plowed. The emergency lot was at the bottom of a hill, about a mile away from my dorm. I dutifully parked my car, walked a mile uphill in the snow for dinner at the dining hall, and hunkered down for the night.

The next afternoon, when the parking ban had been lifted and I went to retrieve my car, I found that I had three tickets. One was for displaying an expired parking pass, and two were for parking in the snow lots without a valid pass. The first of those identical tickets had been issued around 10:00 pm the previous night, and the second was around 7:00 that morning.

I went to the campus police department and showed the tickets to the woman at the front desk.

Me: “I don’t understand why it says my pass is expired. The expiration date is May of this year.”

Receptionist: “Yeah, but the sticker has a hole punch. That means it’s fall semester only.”

Me: “Wait, what?”

Receptionist: “Yeah, all of the tickets are printed with the same expiration date, but then we hole-punch the ones that are only good for the fall semester.”

Me: “That seems deliberately misleading. Where does it say that on the website?”

I pulled up the website on my phone. It was not explained on the basic “Parking Passes” page, and I knew it wasn’t on the student portal. But the receptionist had me click through to a different page, then go to a PDF, and then scroll past a whole bunch of regulations. The hole-punch system was explained there.

Me: “This is so unclear.”

Receptionist: “That’s just the system we use. You can submit a dispute if you want, but in the past, the system has always held up.”

Me: “Okay, but what about these other two tickets? I thought I had a valid pass because the language on the pass suggested I was fine. I made a good faith effort to comply with the parking restrictions.”

Receptionist: “It’s your responsibility to know that the pass is expired. Not having a valid pass is normally a Tier 1 ticket, but parking in the emergency lot without a valid pass is a Tier 3 ticket, which is also why you got two on consecutive days: because you didn’t move your vehicle after you got the first ticket.”

Me: “I didn’t get the first ticket until ten o’clock at night, and I got the second one first thing in the morning. You expected me to walk a mile… at night… in an active blizzard… just in case I had gotten a ticket? When I had no reason to believe I had done anything wrong?”

Receptionist: “Like I said, you can file a dispute if you want.”

So, that’s what I did. They ended up waiving only one of three tickets: the one that had been submitted at 7:00 am. I had to pay for the other two. Also, the spring semester parking passes had sold out, so I had to buy a town parking pass for almost three times as much.

Now, I live in a city with great public transportation, and any time I miss having a car, I remind myself of this story.

My complex has assigned parking and visitor parking. The parking blocks at each assigned space are labeled with the building number and apartment number.

A couple of years ago, I came home from work with one of my extreme migraines, and I accidentally parked in my neighbor’s space instead of mine.

Now, if it were me (as in, it was my neighbor in my spot and I knew that — as you’ll see later, people knew it was me), I would’ve just parked in that neighbor’s spot, essentially doing a temporary swap. Instead, my neighbor took another neighbor’s spot. I’m supposed to be in #3 and parked in #4. So, instead of #4 parking in #3, she parked in #5. And the trail continued.

This migraine episode of mine was particularly bad, as they sometimes are, and I wasn’t leaving my apartment. Two days later, while still suffering this migraine, I had multiple neighbors of mine beating on my door and cussing me out. Now, they didn’t tell me why. They were just threatening me.

I called the office and reported them and said I was going to call the cops on every single one of them.

Property Manager: “Oh, one of them is here right now. Did you know you parked in the wrong spot when you came home with that migraine?”

Me: “No, I was unaware that I made a simple mistake.”

It was a mistake that could’ve been calmly pointed out to me; residents can message each other on our community website, or they could’ve slipped a note under the door, calmly knocked and explained instead of threatening, etc. I fixed it in five seconds before crawling back into bed. (I still live in this complex, but I have saner neighbors now.)

In December of 2001, my boyfriend and I decide to go to the mall for some Christmas shopping. It is before the era of everything being available online, so the parking lot is packed. We park at the far end of a lot near one of the main mall entrances, and we go in to do battle with the rest of the holiday shoppers.

About three hours later, we come out and head for my car. There’s a Jeep parked in front of it with the hazard lights on. I start to panic as we approach, thinking my poor car has been damaged. A young woman jumps out of the Jeep.

Young Woman: *Pointing to my car* “Is that your car?”

Me: “Yes. Is everything okay?”

Young Woman: *Smiling* “Oh, yeah, have I got a story to tell you.”

Apparently, she and her friends had also gone to the mall, and they came in two cars. After they had been there a while, one of the friends noticed she had to leave. Another girl gave her a set of keys and said, “Take my car. I’ll get it later.” The girl nodded, took the keys, and left.

She got to the car, unlocked the door, put on the seatbelt, adjusted the mirrors, put the key in the ignition, and drove off. About five minutes later, while on the nearby highway, she realized that something was off.

She had gotten in the wrong car.

She panicked and immediately drove back to the mall, and somehow, the parking spot was still available. She found her friends, obviously freaked out because she had just stolen a car and had no clue if the owner had come out, seen the car missing, and called the police to report a theft. They found the correct car, which happened to be the same year, make, model, AND color, parked about four spots away from mine. Her friends told her to go to work, and they’d take care of things.

Apparently, her friends waited another hour before we came out to make sure their poor friend didn’t get arrested. I did a little digging, and it turned out that, for whatever reason, every 200,000th car of that make and model had the same key.

I did check to make sure nothing was missing or damaged. There was a part of me that wondered if it was just some weird prank, but I’d never seen these people before, and I have no idea what anyone would gain from telling me a story like this. Honestly, if they hadn’t told me, I’d never have known my car went on a road trip without me.

I do miss that car.

My complex has assigned parking and visitor parking. The parking blocks at each assigned space are labeled with the building number and apartment number (and they’re regularly repainted and perfectly readable). The visitor parking ones are labeled. There are THREE signs up front that say parking is ONLY for residents and their guests, violators will be towed, and the guest LOT is the one in the back with the unassigned spaces.

Every June, the school across the street holds a weekend carnival… and people decide they are entitled to our parking spots. So, when I got home from a frustrating day at work, I found someone in my spot. I waited for twenty minutes, and there was no sign of them.

I called the towing property that’s right on the big sign at the front of the property.

Towing Company: “The property manager has to be the one to call.”

So, I called the property manager.

Property Manager: “We don’t work the weekends, but per our email, the city police told us they’d be the enforcers on this.”

So, I called the city police.

City Police: “We don’t enforce private parking, and anyway, we need the property manager to call.”

I lit into my property manager that Monday about the runaround I’d received, and about how it’s ridiculous that my assigned parking (built into my rent) is unavailable to me and that the towing isn’t even enforceable by us, only them during their working office hours.

This story reminded me of my own petty revenge years ago. I lived on the fourth floor of a tall apartment building in the middle of other similar apartment buildings. The lowest floor had shops, so there was a public parking lot just under our windows.

One evening after dark, when all the shops were closed and those people who were not yet in beds were moving toward them, a car pulled into the empty parking lot. Driver and passengers opened the doors and came out to stand around the car and talk, loudly enough to be able to hear each other over their car’s radio.

I found a small, soft, thoroughly rotten apple in my kitchen. (That can happen when you have relatives who share their harvest generously; you don’t catch the bad apples fast enough.) Going out onto our balcony quietly, I threw my fermented apple juice barely held together by a peel toward the car and pulled swiftly back into the apartment.

There were over a hundred windows facing the parking lot, and a third of them were still lit, so I don’t think that the noisemakers had a chance to know which apartment protested their unannounced late-evening concert. 

I had no idea if I had hit the noisy car or not — the distance was rather big — but before I could search for another soft apple, the car closed its doors and drove away. I found no trace of the apple in the parking lot when I checked it in the daylight.