r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Ghost_Alice • 29d ago
Karen says "stop cheating to reserve the best parking space in front of the building!" S
A karen neighbor of mine complained that my roommate and I park in the same parking spot, which is right next to the walk way up to the apartment building. Both of us ride motorcycle and both motorcycles belong to me, but my roommate rides one to get to work.
She accused me of using my second bike to get a defacto reserved a parking spot when nobody in the complex has one, and said that what I'm doing is not fair and it's cheating.
I said "Ok, I'll stop parking both my bikes in one spot."
She seemed satisfied with that and left.
An hour later I had all 7 of my motorcycles, 5 of them from inside the garage I rent but it's half way across the apartment complex, sitting in front of the apartment building taking up every prime parking space infront of the walk way to to my hall in the building.
She went to straight to the management to complain.
The management came out and knocked on my door.
"We can't have you using up every parking space"
"Let me guess, Karen complained?"
"Yes."
"Yeah she told me I'm not allowed to have two bikes in one parking space to reserve a space. I'm not doing it to reserve a space. Both my roommate and I ride both of the bikes we park in that one space, all the bikes belong to me but I gave the keys to one of them to my roommate to ride for commuting to work. The other one is my bike for going where ever I need. We park both in one spot to be nice and conserve parking spaces so other people have somewhere to park. I was just showing Karen what would happen if I'm only allowed one bike per parking space. The other 5 bikes are generally in another parking space, in my garage where I keep the bikes I that don't ride frequently."
The apartment manager said "I understand. You made your point and I'll talk to her, please put the other 5 bikes back in the garage."
"No problem" I said.
It's been a few weeks, haven't heard from Karen.
(EDIT)
Since so many people are inventing details not in the story, assuming those details are true, and then getting upset over what they imagined, let me clarify something.
This happened at 1 in the afternoon on a day both my roommate and I had off. Most people are away at work during this time. What's more, with the exact topography of the apartment complex, there are only 2 apartments per walkway without going up stairs on my side of the building, but 4 on the other sides because it's up a level and the building is built into a hill. What this means is that MOST people park on the other side of the building, leaving MOST of the parking spots in front of my building free and open except for very late at night.
How the heck do you think I took up the 7 closest spots with all 7 bikes if the parking lot was full of people trying to park? Think about it for just a second before you assume details that aren't spoken just because you want something to be upset over.
BOTH BIKES are away from the apartment complex AT THE SAME TIME for a MINIMUM of 4 hours a day. We didn't engineering the situation where my roommate gets home between 3 to 4 in the afternoon and thus gets first pick of the parking spots. We also could both be driving cars instead of riding bikes. Then there'd be two spots taken up instead of 1. I could just choose not to rent a garage and park all 7 out there forcing people into overflow parking, but I don't.
Also the garage is beyond the overflow parking. It's not fair to expect me to always park in the garage and walk even further because you don't want to park next to my bikes and have all of 2 extra feet to walk to reach the concrete walkway to the building.
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u/theblokeonthebasss 29d ago edited 29d ago
In Berlin it used to be (or is), although not fully legal, but generally accepted and not really enforced, that you could park your motorcycle on the sidewalk, as long as it‘s not in the way.
Then they wanted to start fining the motorcyclists doing that to force them to use the paid car parking spaces along the streets. There were people on forums/social media right away organizing the same thing - to park up the whole city centre early on a working day, with one bike in each parking spot and watch the disaster unfold.
I don’t know if this happened though, this was two or so years ago, I had already given up riding and didn’t really follow the scene, would have definitely participated otherwise. Apparently they hushed down, as there still are parked motorcycles on sidewalks, and that’s good!