My Parking Space

Hi, my name is Jared (everyone says "Hi, Jared"); I'm a condo- owner. (Words of encouragement rise from the crowd).
That's right, I'm not too proud to admit my weakness. Owning a condo isn't something I'm proud of. I've tried to give it up several times. I just can't seem to quit no matter how hard I try. I was doing well, coping with it, for a while but I've had another lapse.
There are so many things to discuss when it comes to living in a condo complex. I'm sure there will be many more rants, but for this particular one I choose to rant about the parking spaces and the inability of my fellow residents to park in them.
First things first, and that is the quantity of the spaces. There is a gross shortage of parking spaces in our complex. Now by gross I don't mean the shortage is disgusting. I mean that we are at least 144 spaces short. The idea is that everyone parks a car in their garage and parks their other car in the spaces provided. This is good in theory, that theory being that people have no more than two cars and just enough stuff to fill their house and not their garage. However, seeing that everyone owns at least two cars (and most own three) and their garage is filled to overflowing (because even if you have just the bare essentials it's still way more than you can fit in an 890 sq. ft. Condo) the few spots provided are like twinkies at a Jenny Craig convention, they go fast and people are willing to fight for them. So when you pull up to the parking lot, and that ray of light bursts through the clouds and shines on the one vacant spot while the Hallelujah chorus rings out, you pull in as fast as you can. He who hesitates is lost, and forced to park by the pool or possibly outside of the complex.
The particular incident which I shall now relate occurred last week. I came home from work hoping to find a spot near my house because I’m lazy and didn’t really want to walk that far. Lo, and behold, there is a spot just a few spaces from my back porch. I whip in and whisper a prayer of thanks for the great blessing which God has just bestowed upon me. Feeling the adrenaline rush of seeing the hand of God at work, I get out of my truck and start up the sidewalk with a spring in my step. Then I heard a diminutive voice call from behind me.
“Could you be careful next time?” the voice whispers.
I turned around and didn’t see anyone at first. Then I noticed a woman standing between my truck and a gray SUV. I asked her if she was speaking to me (not in the Al Pacino, “you talkin’ ta me?” way but in a very polite attempt to understand what she could possibly want me to be careful about). She repeated her previous statement, and followed it with, “You hit my car.”
A rush of panic ripped through my chest. I did quickly whip into the spot; did I happen to sideswipe her as I did so? Surely not, I would have noticed metal scraping by metal, right? She then explained that when I got out of my truck I hit her car with my door and she saw and heard the whole thing from her kitchen. She pointed back over her shoulder to her condo. Now, I was standing at the front corner of my car, with a direct view of the place my door ALLEDGEDLY struck her car and her back porch. There is no way she could have seen this happen from her house. The angle of the car to the house was all wrong. Once I explained that little nugget of information to her, she amended her statement to simply state that she had heard it happen.
If I may pause for a moment in my narrative, I believe it is relevant to the case before you that I explain what exactly I drive. My little beauty is a 1982 Dodge Ram 50 pickup. I am not quite certain if the 50 represents the horsepower my little monster pulls or if it is a reference to the size of the engine in cubic inches. Either way I think you get the idea that I don’t drive around a full size behemoth with the overinflated tires that are so popular nowadays. Nope, this is a throwback to a simpler time when miniatures were all the rage. As a matter of fact, I am fairly certain that you could drive my pickup into the bed of most of those larger trucks with enough room left over for a trip to Costco. You could practically park it sideways in one of our parking spaces and drop the tailgate without coming close to hitting another vehicle. The picture that I am trying to paint here is that the entire cab of my truck is barely three feet deep, leaving the door a few inches shorter than that. I would have had to park in her passenger seat to hit her. Get the picture, okay, back to the story.
I then explained to her that my truck door was not very big at all and probably wouldn't reach her vehicle. She asserted herself and proclaimed that she “heard what she heard!” (At this point I’m wondering if one of the many voices that occupy her head just belched or something and she mistook that for the sound of my door striking hers). In the interest of being a good neighbor, I explained to her that I was generally pretty careful about such things but if I did hit her which I don’t believe I did, I was sorry and assured her that I would pay special attention to exiting my car in the future, especially when I was parked next to her.
A few minutes later, after relating the incident to my wife, I went back out to my truck to get something off the front seat and I opened my door as wide as I could. There was no less than 8 inches between my fully extended door and her SUV. Feeling fully vindicated, I vowed to let this woman know that I was serious about my promise to pay special attention to her vehicle.
Now, whenever I pull up to my parking lot I look for her vehicle and if possible I park next to it. Even if there is a spot open closer to my condo, I park next to her. I get out of my vehicle, leave the door open and pull out the measuring tape that now sits on my front seat and measure the distance between my car and hers. Once I’ve done that, I turn toward her house, give her two thumbs up and call out the number of inches between our vehicles. Why? Because that’s the kind of neighbor I am, that’s why!