Who Is RUNNING This City?
Posting Location: University Village.
If things had gone smoothly today, I would have been making tonight's post from home. As you can see, things did not go smoothly today.
See, the plan was to see my boyfriend one last time before the break, as the odds of us getting together over the holidays are slim. I would then come back to the apartment, finish cleaning up some, throw my stuff into the car, and be on the highway by around 2:00, 3:00 at the latest. I parked on the street outside his house, and went in to spend some time with him. Now, I'll admit, when I arrived there was plenty of space in one spot between two cars, and I did park a little close to the car in front of me; I figured this would be fine enough, as the guy had plenty of space in front of him to pull out should he need to. Well, that move came back to bite me in the ass, because lo and behold I come out to find that another car has come and boxed me in. And I mean, there was no way I was going to be getting out of that spot anytime soon.
Did you know that in cases like these, where you're boxed in by another car parking on the street, that you have no options legally available to you other than just waiting the other guys out? That's right, checked with the local police and everything; because they "couldn't know who got there first," there's nothing they can do. Who got there first? Can that really matter?
It just struck me as odd that, with all the different laws on the books regarding traffic and parking, they apparently have nothing covering this kind of situation. One can almost imagine a situation where someone might lose their job because two people happened to park around them and had nowhere else they had to be for the rest of the week. Hell, what if I had been a medical specialist, and someone's life was now at risk because the only option I now had was call a cab? Okay, so maybe I'm intentionally coming up with scenarios that are against the odds because I'm ticked at the inconvenience this caused me. But then again, I'll bet the odds are around the same that the local fire department will have to use any given fire hydrant at any given time, and yet we have laws against parking in front of those.
At any rate, I ended up waiting over six hours before one of the yocko's finally had somewhere else to be, by which point it was 6:00 PM and I was in no mood for a two hour drive upstate (to say nothing of packing). So, I put off going home until the next day and just went back to the apartment.
This is the part where I check my mail and find a letter addressed to someone at 567 Stinchcomb Drive. Which is not my address. Aside from also being in University Village, it's not even remotely near being my address (though, incidentally, they got the right room number). How it mistakenly got delivered to my mailbox is beyond me. What's even more baffling is that there's a 557 Stinchcomb Drive, which, if someone were to make a mistake in delivering a letter to 567 Stinchcomb, you'd think it'd be to that address.
The icing on the cake is that I did some walking, and from what I can tell 567 Stinchcomb Drive does not, in fact, actually exist.
So now, on top of all the packing and driving and unpacking I now have to do tommorrow, I have to find a way to get this to a post office and do a "return to sender" thing. I just love Columbus. It's a good thing I'll be spending the next few weeks back in Parma, because this city has really started to grate on me as of late.
If things had gone smoothly today, I would have been making tonight's post from home. As you can see, things did not go smoothly today.
See, the plan was to see my boyfriend one last time before the break, as the odds of us getting together over the holidays are slim. I would then come back to the apartment, finish cleaning up some, throw my stuff into the car, and be on the highway by around 2:00, 3:00 at the latest. I parked on the street outside his house, and went in to spend some time with him. Now, I'll admit, when I arrived there was plenty of space in one spot between two cars, and I did park a little close to the car in front of me; I figured this would be fine enough, as the guy had plenty of space in front of him to pull out should he need to. Well, that move came back to bite me in the ass, because lo and behold I come out to find that another car has come and boxed me in. And I mean, there was no way I was going to be getting out of that spot anytime soon.
Did you know that in cases like these, where you're boxed in by another car parking on the street, that you have no options legally available to you other than just waiting the other guys out? That's right, checked with the local police and everything; because they "couldn't know who got there first," there's nothing they can do. Who got there first? Can that really matter?
It just struck me as odd that, with all the different laws on the books regarding traffic and parking, they apparently have nothing covering this kind of situation. One can almost imagine a situation where someone might lose their job because two people happened to park around them and had nowhere else they had to be for the rest of the week. Hell, what if I had been a medical specialist, and someone's life was now at risk because the only option I now had was call a cab? Okay, so maybe I'm intentionally coming up with scenarios that are against the odds because I'm ticked at the inconvenience this caused me. But then again, I'll bet the odds are around the same that the local fire department will have to use any given fire hydrant at any given time, and yet we have laws against parking in front of those.
At any rate, I ended up waiting over six hours before one of the yocko's finally had somewhere else to be, by which point it was 6:00 PM and I was in no mood for a two hour drive upstate (to say nothing of packing). So, I put off going home until the next day and just went back to the apartment.
This is the part where I check my mail and find a letter addressed to someone at 567 Stinchcomb Drive. Which is not my address. Aside from also being in University Village, it's not even remotely near being my address (though, incidentally, they got the right room number). How it mistakenly got delivered to my mailbox is beyond me. What's even more baffling is that there's a 557 Stinchcomb Drive, which, if someone were to make a mistake in delivering a letter to 567 Stinchcomb, you'd think it'd be to that address.
The icing on the cake is that I did some walking, and from what I can tell 567 Stinchcomb Drive does not, in fact, actually exist.
So now, on top of all the packing and driving and unpacking I now have to do tommorrow, I have to find a way to get this to a post office and do a "return to sender" thing. I just love Columbus. It's a good thing I'll be spending the next few weeks back in Parma, because this city has really started to grate on me as of late.
Labels: life rant, University Village
posted by Mithrandalf at 1:34 AM
2 Comments:
That doens't seem to be the only parking problem Columbus has.
http://www.osusentinel.com/?page=section§ion=008&id=00276
And my friend's roommate keeps getting some schmuck's cell phone bill in her mail.
A new invention: a thingy that pops out from your front bumper when you parallel park that is just long enough to allow you to pull back into the street without backing up first. When parking, it lights up a signal on the dash when you get too close. After you have left, if someone backs up too close to you, it sets off an alarm that screeches, "You are too damn close, buster!"
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