What Winter Brings

By The Common Man

Please pardon a brief digression from our normal baseball-centric content.  One of the fundamental tenets that our society from devolving into chaos, a tenet that gets repeatedly tested during the winter, is that you must park your car within the lines.  When you don't do that, you set off a chain reaction of terrible parking that leads to fewer viable spaces for everyone else, and The Common Man is left to park in the hinterlands even though he gets to work early.   It starts with not parking within the lines. Then you start deliberately taking up two spaces, then parking perpendicular to the lines.  Then anarchy.  Rioting and looting in the streets.  The center cannot hold and things fall apart.

Last night, after work, The Common Man came out to his car to find that he had no hope of accessing the driver's side door, thanks to the unfathomably horrible parking job of the fool in the next space (that's TCM's car on the right).  Unable to find any trace of the offending parker, TCM was moved to leave the following note, which he shares in the hopes of persuading other people who violate the parking lot's sacred tenets to park more carefully.

Dear Jackass,

Thank you for parking your car in such a manner that I cannot access my driver's side door even though I am parked completely within the lines in my space. Know that, as I climb through my car from the passenger side, I will be cursing you and all that you stand for under my breath. Perhaps next time, you could check your passenger side to make sure you have not inadvertently almost sheared off the door of the car next to you. As I run over children and small puppies in your name, please know that you have earned nothing but my complete and total contempt with your inability to park with anything resembling competence. Thanks.