PARKING SPOT WAR

The driveway was blocked again, this time by a massive Benz, nose-in, "just barely blocking" the entrance while the neighbors acted like nothing was wrong.

By then, the poster had already been fighting the same problem for days, calling the city over and over and getting nowhere. The answer was always the same kind of dead end: "it's not that they won't come out it's that it takes hours to get to talk to anyone and more hours for someone to come out," and even then, "they never show up." Tow companies were no better. One call led to another, and then back again, until it all became, in the poster's words, "A long redundant circle."

The driveway problem wasn't just annoying. The poster said they were "a younger girl" and their roommates were also girls, and they did not feel safe confronting the grown man next door every day. "We aren't comfortable banging on this grown man's door every day asking him to move his cars," they wrote. The house was full of working people who couldn't afford to wait around. "We all work ALOT," the poster said. "we can't just leave a car blocking our own driveway everyday." Parking around the issue was no help either. They couldn't block the neighbor's driveway because it was already packed with his own cars, and the street was too small to double park.

Some people suggested ugly fixes, "damaging his cars, jacking them up and moving them etc.", but the poster said they had already filed a police report and did not want to make things worse.

So they switched tactics. In the update, they said they ordered a pole and no-parking signs, and contacted a company to cement the pole into the side of the driveway where it meets the sidewalk. Before that could happen, they ran into the neighbor's wife and asked her to tell him to stop. She said she would talk to him, though she added that family was in town for the holidays, Halloween.

The poster didn't soften the message. They told her the blocked driveway was dangerous. "It was a danger to me and my roommates if we couldn't get out of our driveway," they said. In an emergency, the risk was even worse: "That in an emergency situation like if one of us got hurt or a fire that she would be potentially trapping us inside our own home." They added, "That if this continues I will be calling the police." The wife said she understood and promised, "she understands and it won't happen again."

It happened again the next day.

The poster came home to find the neighbor's massive Benz barely covering the driveway. So they parked behind it, moved their trash cans out to the street in front of the car, and said they would see how it goes.