this lovely little exchange from seattle comes to us via the ever-brilliant dan savage at the stranger. it reads a bit like a “SAHM vs. WOHM” faceoff on urbanbaby, with blessedly fewer acronyms.
(more backstory and larger versions of the photos over at the slog.)
related: there’s hertz…and there’s “not exactly”
extra credit: “not that kind of gay” [the moth podcast]
EMAIL THIS POST TO A PAL!
70 responses so far ↓
#1 secondsout
“I seriously doubt that your neighbors, who(m) you supposedly represent would approve such a note.”
If these were my neighbors posting the rude note, I’d certainly approve. But then again, that’s me.
May 22, 2008 at 3:09 pm rating: +2
#2 unholyghost2003
Why the GIANT highlight on “note” ?
May 22, 2008 at 3:12 pm rating: 0
#3 Lorelie
“We have many children, elderly, handicapped, and construction workers on our block. . . ”
I’m not sure which takes me more aback. The fact that children are parking on this street, or that someone is considerate of construction workers.
May 22, 2008 at 3:13 pm rating: +23
#4 Canthz_B
They should charge passersby to see the trotting cars.
May 22, 2008 at 3:20 pm rating: +4
#5 Mishee
Why the heck does it matter to the handicapped, elderly, and children if there is a car parked on the road?
It’s not like they drive and need the spot!
May 22, 2008 at 3:24 pm rating: +10
#6 Canthz_B
Dear resident(s) of 16th Ave:
Since you apparently own 16th Ave., the next time the street needs repaving or a streetlight needs repair, please do not contact the city.
Bob the Builder
Dept. of Public Works
May 22, 2008 at 3:26 pm rating: +33
#7 zombieBlanco
Cheap Parker is my new hero. I’m going to hunt him/her down and and make her/him my sex slave.
May 22, 2008 at 3:29 pm rating: +4
#8 Canthz_B
Dear resident(s) of 16th Ave.:
Sorry to have inconvenienced you.
I’m trotting off to work right now.
I’m sure we will have an opportunity to discuss this and other matters at a later date.
F.U. Upgood
Tax Auditor
Internal Revenue Service
May 22, 2008 at 3:34 pm rating: +12
#9 shirky
ah, people who think they own street parking. in boston they’ll just key your car if you tke “their” space. Residents of Bitchteenth ave are showing restraint.
May 22, 2008 at 3:39 pm rating: +1
#10 Sarah
Dear Resident:
Point taken. I will no longer park on your block. I will instead use your driveway. That’s what it’s for, right?
May 22, 2008 at 3:39 pm rating: +3
#11 Canthz_B
This was a hand-written note.
This suggests that the person only wrote the one note.
How much of a burden can only one parked car put on a whole block?
May 22, 2008 at 3:53 pm rating: +5
#12 Canthz_B
Sounds like someone is burned out after her wife-beating construction worker husband leaves her alone to take care of the kids and an elderly handicapped parent all damned day!
Team Caregiver Assistance Program
May 22, 2008 at 3:56 pm rating: +8
#13 claw71
This is really funny to me.
When we moved into our house there was this batty old woman across the street. She wasn’t mean but her daughter, who was in her late 50s was a piece of work.
We had company over so I parked across the street from our driveway one weekend. Daughter Dearest happened to be out for her monthly keeping-my-name-in-the-will vistit and took it upon herself to confront me on parking on the street in front of her mother’s house.
I would have just apologized and moved the car but she seemed to really want to guilt me into submission so she laid it on pretty think. Then she topped it with a cherry: she is blind, you know .
At that point I had no choice but to be rude. Then why does she care if I park there?
The daughter got angry but tried to win this battle. She gave me a littany of reasons all of which I shot down. The worst was this story about how people who picked her mother up needed to park there. THE WOMAN HAD TWO DRIVEWAYS!!!
Finally she muttered something about city codes and not parking on the street. I reminded her that we were in the City of Columbus and no such code existed.
Some people think they own the street they live on.
Just becareful…sometimes they slash tires too.
May 22, 2008 at 4:09 pm rating: +17
#14 se
In a lot of cities today, people are being shot for taking a parking spot in front of someones house all day, every day. maybe this person was being nice to ask before opening fire.
May 22, 2008 at 4:13 pm rating: +7
#15 KittyKat
The pimps and drug dealers need that parking spot. WTF!?
May 22, 2008 at 4:14 pm rating: +6
#16 claw71
I think the commuter needs to customize the Camry with some 20″ rims, ghetto-fied graphics and some tinted windows. Then you tweak the alarm so it blasts DMX rapping about losing his mind when ever anybody thinks about looking at the car. Those cappucino-frothing house fraus would cower in fear if they thought an OG was chillin in their hood.
May 22, 2008 at 4:16 pm rating: +8
#17 Canthz_B
MARP (Mothers Against Rude Parking) has proposed this sign be approved for placement:
NO PARKING
ANYWHERE
CHILDREN
THE ELDERLY
THE DISABLED
AND CONSTRUCTION
WORKERS LIVE
EVERYWHERE
May 22, 2008 at 4:31 pm rating: +12
#18 amazon
The residents near my work leave us similar notes. Except they’re not notes. More like conceptual PA art:
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9296/photojy8.jpg
If anyone ever had ever left me a note like that on my car, I’d write them a nice reply… in herbicide on their lawn.
May 22, 2008 at 5:23 pm rating: +6
#19 zchamu
I love how the note starts out with decent penmanship and is reasonable, although blunt. Then as the meds wear off and the note descends into lunacy, the writing gets BIGGER and LOOPIER, illustrating just how crazy this chiquita is for giving a shit about people parking on a street! In the city! Heaven forbid!
May 22, 2008 at 5:31 pm rating: +2
#20 Quite Contrary
This note looks exactly like a note that will be written by Cody in 20 years. After her husband, Chip, leaves her for his secretary, she will strapped for cash and forced to write on fewer sheets of paper, forcing her handwriting to become smaller in size. The bitterness and entitlement, however, remain.
May 22, 2008 at 6:37 pm rating: +4
#21 Whoa...like, whoa.
How dare that person leave their car at home and use public transport or walk!
Oh the humanity!
May 22, 2008 at 6:41 pm rating: +3
#22 Rachael
Parking rules are really kind of interesting to me. In my hometown (population 80,000), if you park on the street in front of someone’s house it should be with good reason. My parents find it “strange” when someone parks in front of our house on the street.
Here in SF you’re goddamn lucky if you find street parking anywhere near your place. You wouldn’t find as much of this bitchery here, though I do confess to getting pissed off at the neighbor who owns a business called the “Chinese Relaxation Tour.” They park their “Relaxation Bus” on the street all the time and it takes up almost three spots. I keep wanting to leave them a rude note but that would be so unfair…
May 22, 2008 at 8:38 pm rating: 0
#23 Cricket
I hate people.
May 22, 2008 at 10:41 pm rating: +4
#24 daniel
I’m guessing that note was written by an elderly construction worker in a wheelchair.
May 22, 2008 at 11:06 pm rating: +4
#25 park rose
Dear Driver, please do not Dark your car on mr block….?????????
May 22, 2008 at 11:33 pm rating: +1
#26 Burn baby, BURN!
I used to live in the hills of Oakland, California. A real b#@*h of a woman (and family) lived next door. Yes, parking was tight but everyone else understood that they didn’t own the street and accepted the situation graciously.
She didn’t. If you, or a visitor, DARED to park in front of HER house, she would send her little weenie boy schlub of a husband over to whine until you moved your car.
At the same time she was running an business out of her home illegally with no city permit or approval and she had no problem with her employees and workers parking all day long in front of other people’s homes.
It made no sense to me, or to anyone else in the neighborhood, but it was usually easier to give in than argue with her or her emasculated excuse for a spouse.
Her home burned to the ground in the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991. It was the only home that burned on our street.
This may sound terrible, but most of the neighbors felt as though she finally got what she deserved.
I still despise the dumb cow.
May 22, 2008 at 11:41 pm rating: +6
#27 Mishee
There was a woman who lived at the end corner of our small cul de sac. She was an older, Greek (I SWEAR TO GOD) woman, and she had a fire hydrant smack in front of her house. At first, she would paint the entire curb red, from one end of her house, all the way around the corner to the end of the side of her house. She had a camera she kept ready (you could see the little green light - this was the 90’s, no digital yet) in the windowsill of her home. She would take pictures of people walking by, parking their cars, and God Forbid the next door neighb or the people across the way had a party… she would be calling the PD all night!
Well, neighbors complained (once she got put on probation for spraying her next door neighb, a really cool dude named Joe, with the hose) and she was told she couldn’t paint the curb anymore, except where the hydrant was.
She also had painted her entire driveway a weird brick red, and erected a makeshift “fence” about 1 1/2 ft high to block off anyone from pulling into her driveway (presumably to turn around once they realized they turned into a court)…
Once my mom and I were in the car arguing, so she stopped along the side of the house on the side of the road to concentrate on yelling at me, and Mrs. Duvalis (sp?) came running out yelling that we couldn’t park there and she had a permit (she always said that) and we had to leave… my mother was already irritated, just looked at her (with The Look) and yelled “FUCK YOU” as she flipped her the bird. One of my cooler moments with mom as a teen.
I tortured her to no end, it was fun. She would call the cops EVERY SINGLE TIME we would even hang out by the hydrant, waiting for a friend’s mom to come get him… they would show up, chat with us for a minute, go inside and talk to her, and leave. Apparently Sunnyvale P.D. has a drawer FULL of pictures from her over the years. All the cops around here know her.
She also hit me and another little girl who lived across the street from her… I attacked her but the little girl’s family just pressed charges. I guess she died though in the last few years, cause I went by about a month ago and the driveway fence was gone, and the paint had disappeared.
I miss torturing that damn Greek.
May 22, 2008 at 11:54 pm rating: +6
#28 LeishBlog
That’s the writing of an elderly nothing else to do psychopath.
May 23, 2008 at 1:22 am rating: 0
#29 Megan
I got a note like this once during college… the dorm parking lot did not have enough space so a lot of us had to park along the street. A person who owned one of the houses along the street put a note on my car talking about how they had friends that wanted to park in front of the house, etc. I wish I had saved that note…. It blew me away that they felt like they had to be rude. A nice note would have accomplished the same thing and NOT ruined my day.
The commenter who mentioned someone with a fence in front of their driveway reminded me of my parents’ next door neighbor. Every year there’s a neighborhood-wide garage sale and every year that neighbor puts those saw horse things in front of his driveway so people don’t use it to turn around, or whatever. I’ve seen him trying to wash tire marks off of it too… that’s what happens on a driveway, you just gotta deal with it…
May 23, 2008 at 1:24 am rating: +2
#30 TuesdayPillow
That is definitely the handwriting of an elderly woman. Is that what happens when you get old? You have nothing better to do with your time so you start inventing things to write passive-aggressive notes about?
May 23, 2008 at 4:00 am rating: 0
#31 fink
Dear Driver,
If you can afford a computer and a printer, then surely you can afford parking. Srsly. I had to write on a legal pad.
May 23, 2008 at 10:20 am rating: +3
#32 GhostWriter
Anybody who trots off to work is a drone.
May 23, 2008 at 10:49 am rating: 0
#33 Lurker
I have often parked on this street before,
But I never got a note that wasn’t sweet before.
‘Though a parking pass costs as much as gas,
I won’t park on the street where you live.
Are there parking lots in the heart of town?
Off to work I trot, down in another part of town.
Will the children play ‘neath my Chevrolet?
No, that’s just on the street where you live.
And, oh! The towering feeling
When construction workers are near;
The overpowering feeling
Another nasty note may suddenly appear!
People stop and stare; they don;t bother me.
For I know it’s just the handicapped and alderly.
I’ll go park and ride, I’ll be damned if I’d
Park again on the street where you live!
May 23, 2008 at 11:42 am rating: +6
#34 poochie
That handwriting is just bloody awful. I can’t read that shit.
A child? No, they’d be writing in crayon and block capitals. Construction worker? Again, crayons. Elderly, maybe blame Parkinsons for the handwriting. Handicapped, well, any number of defects. Did I say defects? Sorry, I meant defects.
Defects? I mean, defects. Jesus, how are you supposed to put this politely? I can’t. I’m sorry. Defects.
I’m not really sorry. And I’d keep parking there.
May 23, 2008 at 12:58 pm rating: +1
#35 Dani
WOW! I think that note is from MY neighbors, Larry and John. They, too, leave angry notes on otherwise-legally parked cars. I have saved them all in a file at my home, an act which I recognize is also passive aggressive.
_Dani in MA.
May 23, 2008 at 2:02 pm rating: +2
#36 just me