Neighbor Wars·
THE PARKING SPOT WAR
In an Ontario reservation townhouse row, two neighbors spar over two parking spots, using garbage and snow to block and counterblock in a petty, escalating game of musical chairs.
Was that petty, or fair payback?
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The war over a parking spot started with a garbage bag and ended with "musical chairs" in a townhouse lot on a reservation in Ontario.
The poster lives in a row of townhouses where each unit gets two spaces and there is no visitor parking. They have one car. Their neighbors, the poster says, usually keep three cars. To keep from blocking their own vehicle in, the poster often puts garbage in the visitor spot on garbage day, but says they have always been fine with neighbors using that space when it is empty.
This time, the neighbors took that as permission to park in the poster's main spot.
When the poster came home and found nowhere to park, they knocked on the door and asked the woman to move the vehicle. The woman shot back, "I only parked there because you blocked the other spot with your garbage."
The poster answered that each unit gets two spaces and that the extra one was fair game when it wasn't being used: "we each get two spaces, you're welcome to use my extra space when I'm not using it."
Then, according to the poster, the neighbor muttered that "she's first Nations and she's from here," which the poster took as an entitled jab. That hit harder because the poster says they had already been trying to be accommodating, letting the neighbors use the space, shoveling their parking area, bringing back their garbage bins, picking up loose trash, and generally trying to be good neighbors.
The car eventually moved. The favors did not continue.
After that, the poster says either the neighbor or the neighbor's teenage kids shoved snow onto the poster's freshly shoveled parking spot and walkway. That was the point, the poster says, where the friendly help stopped.
So on garbage day, the poster kept putting the bins in the guest space, but now directly behind the neighbor's car.
The neighbor answered by moving the garbage into the poster's main parking spot so she could get out. The poster moved it back immediately. Later, the neighbor pulled back up, looked dumbfounded, and sat for several minutes, apparently deciding what to do next.
That back-and-forth became the whole routine: the poster placing garbage behind the car, the neighbor shifting it, and the poster moving it back again. The poster called it "musical chairs" and asked whether blocking the neighbor's car with garbage made them the asshole, or just petty enough to walk a little farther and put the bins somewhere else.