COLUMN: Would I Do That, Too?

By Tobin Barnes
I was miffed after pulling into our post office parking lot.

Of course, the parking lot itself is a construction of fiendish design, seemingly planned to make patrons feel small and—insidiously, I think—cooperative.

Considering how much traffic the lot is called upon to handle, it feels nervously constricted. If it were human, it’d be all a-jitter with apprehension.

And I’m not letting any cats out of any bags. Anyone who has driven into it, with or without trepidation, will tell you the same.

First, you have to drive down a concrete slot the width of a toboggan run and the slope of a cereal bowl. That initiation is just the beginning.

After that, everything continues to be narrow and compact, like an old school cloakroom—interdependently with other patrons, you have to kind of sidle in and sidle out to get your business done. Because of the claustrophobic lack of space, you regularly have to wait for people to come and go before you can come and go.

There’s no free-wheeling openness here that would mimic the vast stretches of the Great Plains upon which the parking lot is located. There’s no haughty bravado of spaciousness that might boisterously beller, “We possess this land and we intend to use it fully.”

No, none whatsoever.

There’s no rugged individualism of the Old West possible here. Our rightful broad-shouldered American heritage has been denied to patrons of this post office.

Here, in this parking lot, you are a social insect who must abide with the rules of the ant farm. Someone, no one will ever know who, put the farm on too small a plot, perhaps intentionally, and now we ants are left dithering with the results.

And I get it. I understand the logic.

I’ve been illustrating, not complaining.

I can do the social insect gig with the best of them. I’ve always been ready and raring to conform. I kind of feel my comfort zone in that mode—just so long as the other ants keep in line, too.

But not so.

The other day when I pulled into the lot, carefully, as I’ve learned to do, I saw that, horror of horrors, someone was abusing ant farm rules. He or she was diagonally parked across three whole spaces—there can’t be more than twenty total—right there next to the door of the post office.

The car was a snazzy, late model, silver-grey Mercedes convertible (top down) with black leather interior.

Yeah, I knew what was going on right away.

He or she—let’s go with “she” this time rather than the default lumpish self-absorbed “he,” just for variety—was protecting their pricey baby from inadvertent dings so often liberally applied by the uncaring and unwashed masses in public parking lots across America.

And can you blame her?

If I were driving a late-model Mercedes, rather than my 2002 Toyota RAV, wouldn’t I also park so as to take up three spots, including a handicapped-accessible spot, as she did?

With my RAV I take any available spot. What’s another ding?

But when my RAV was new, and I was under the illusion that it always could be, I was much more careful. I’d park far away from any potential ding predators, no matter how far I had to walk to do my business. Of course, over time and a starter collection of dings, that impulse wore off.

But how about if I, theoretically speaking, had a nice late-model Mercedes, wouldn’t I take up three spaces, including a handicapped-accessible spot to protect my beautiful baby?

I hope not.

Would I, instead, wait, if necessary, for two spaces farthest away from the door and then walk the thirty yards?

I hope so.