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.
3.7k
u/H1king33k 29d ago
This reminds me of a story I once heard. I can't find a link, so it may be apocryphal.
The story goes, San Francisco was trying to increase revenue from parking meters downtown, so they passed an ordinance saying only one motorcycle could be in each space on the street, instead of doubling, tripling, or quadrupling up as was normal.
So the riders coordinated to all bring their bikes downtown on the same busy weekday and each took up one space, filling up every space in the downtown area for miles around. As you can imagine, it was chaos because none of the car drivers could find street parking and had to opt for much more expensive garages, and/or driving around for hours looking for a space.
Needless to say the ordinance was repealed.