I wish, I wish, I wish! I’ve always wondered what happened to deranged dude, and wish I could have seen the aftermath. 
I think, were I in your place, unless I were totally obligated to be someplace, I would have had to have gone back and chosen a safe vantage point just to see what would happen.
I mean, we get justice in these instances so rarely.
That’s awesome. And even better than mine, as you got to have face to face satisfaction!!
Obsidian, if this ever happens again, take a picture of the car blocking your driveway and another of the license plate. Then visit your local p.d. and bring the pictures and some doughnuts. No cursing or confrontation required.
My husband and I live in a house near both a couple churches and a school, and the house (we rent) is owned by one of these institutions. As a number of folks know this, some seem to think that they can treat our driveway as a public parking spot when space runs low on the street/in the official lots. My husband has, on occasion, come home to find a vehicle pulled up in the driveway, where we’d park, all the way up to the garage. In those instances, if no one’s forthcoming shortly, he just parks snugly up behind the offender’s vehicle (not hanging out much onto the street at all), gets out and locks the car, and goes in the house to sit down, watch some TV, and wait for the inevitable doorbell. Which he takes his time answering, and then explains that the property may not be owned by us, but it is rented by us, and the owners fully support that we are the ones who have use of the driveway.
We haven’t been parked in yet, though inevitably we’ll get some big honking SUVs pulled up barely overlapping the edges of our driveway, and it’ll be a trick to back out while trying to see around these two large vehicles, much less avoid dinging either of them in the process.
Road Rage is a weird thing - psychologists note that it’s an odd mixture of cowardice and hostility. The cowardice stems from the fact that we feel safer than normal when surrounded by a steel man-made machine and as such, we feel safe in letting our hostile sub-selfs run riot.
Anyways, I didn’t post again to pontificate on road rage - I merely wanted to agree with the posts above that one of the frustrations attached to reacting “passively” in the face of road-rage is that we so rarely get to see the asshole in question getting their karma. I’m sure if we knew the asshole was gonna get busted by a state trooper EVERY TIME then most of us would be much happier to react passively I’d wager.
Carjones (Car Hone ays):
The bravado one feels, when safely ensconsed in one’s vehicle.
The weirdest road rage story I ever heard involved a mother and daughter who were upset at a trucker for some reason, passed the trucker, then for whatever reason decided to pull a J-turn and one of the pair flung shit at the trucker’s windshield. I don’t remember exactly what happened after that but suffice it to say that their little stunt landed them in the morgue.
The killer ending scenario would be where he is now blocking others from making right turns and they are honking and cursing at him.
Nice theory, but no. So long as Survey Guy and Wife were able to open the truck doors and walk away, there was no false imprisonment. Being inconvienenced does not equal false imprisonment.
I’m also curious as to how Survey Guy got away with it.
Re: the OP. Stupid bitch makes it difficult for the rest of us. I remember when I volunteered at an elementary school in San Francisco. Parking was of course, horrendous. One day I parked not one inch across someone’s driveway. I was late and had circled everything within walking distance at least 5 times. Now I’m telling you, no more than one inch of my car was in this woman’s driveway. Driveway was huge, no cars in it (yes I know, there could’ve been one in the garage). Unless this woman drove a tank and was mostly blind, there was no way in hell she wouldn’t have been able to back out. Little did I know I had parked in front of the House Of Doom. Sure enough, when I got out of work, my car had been towed. A couple hours and couple hundred bucks later, I was told by the staff at school and the tow-yard that this woman’s hobby was getting any car that had parked even one centimeter in front of her driveway towed. It had nothing to do with inconvienence. This woman had a goddamn vendetta. And this woman never even went anywhere! She was retired and barely left her house! She honestly just had nothing better to do.
Sad thing is this horrible woman had probably just had her fill of assholes like the woman in the OP and didn’t give a fuck anymore. Talk about a waste of the city’s time and resources.
Gah.
Hmmm. I think her son must live around the corner from my son’s elementary school.
We live just over half a mile from the school, so most of the time I walk my son to and from school. If I’ve been caught in traffic and don’t get home in time to drop the car at home and meet him at school, or if it’s raining, though, I sometimes park my car briefly just around the corner from the school, meet him at the walker pick-up spot*, and drive him home. If it’s raining, I’m usually not the only Mom doing this.
There is a guy who lives around the corner from the school who gets absolutely furious if he sees anyone parked in front of his home — even though we all leave at least 8 to 10 feet clearance on either side of his driveway, do not walk in his yard, and are typically parked there for approximately 5 minutes or so. He has come out and berated me for this before. I suggested that if he thought that it was illegal for me to park my car on a public street that he call the police and ask them to do something about it, and that I would gladly wait until they arrived. He didn’t take me up on my offer, and has merely glared at me when he’s seen me park there since then.
- The teachers have standing instructions where children should be released each day. There are bus kids, walker kids, and carpool kids. If I know in advance I will want to pick my son up at carpool one day, I can send a note beforehand, and the teacher will dismiss him there. For impromptu decisions like bad traffic or the rainy day situation, though, my kid will still automatically be released to the walker line.
The parents of the carpool kids are not allowed to park their cars. The cars stay in a line, and a spotter about 8 - 10 cars from the start of the line calls out the kid’s name (which is posted in the front window of the car.) The kid then goes and gets in line, and hops in Mom’s car when it gets to the front of the line. I’ve never seen this guy’s driveway blocked, and never seen cars parked in front of his house for more than 10 minutes or so at a time. I guess he is just hyper-territorial.
That has got to be the most organized school on the planet. My school was lucky if they could keep track of who was enrolled.
I think most of the elementary schools around here do this now. (And I think they copied that from the YMCA, as they’ve been using this method at their nursery and camp programs for years.)
They also control carpool in the morning. A couple of staff people and student patrol officers let the kids out of parents’ cars from the carpool line in the mornings. It is much safer for everyone, since it avoids having children dart all through the parking lot and in between moving cars. Since the school has only a very limited number of parking spaces for visitors, this is a pretty good solution with safety, convenience for parents, and minimizing the impact on the neighgors in mind.
I was in a situation similar to silver1 a few months ago. A. was driving. He pulls up to a four way stop, preparing to turn right. Half a block down on our left, there is a little red BMW, approaching the same stop.
A. stops, then turns right. BMW slows down, then goes on through the intersection, which puts him behind us. The speed limit on this road is 25, then 30. They’ve been running speed traps along here for weeks now, so A is going the speed limit. This is interminably slow for little red beemer, so he starts swerving back and forth behind us on a two lane residential road next to an elementary school as if this will somehow allow him to pass us.
We get to the next light (maybe two miles down the road) and we’re in the middle lane. A right turn lane opens up from this road, and we’ve stopped behind the car in front of us, just blocking his car (not on purpose, that’s just where we were). He starts honking. As the light turns green, we move up a bit with traffic and he zooms past us, turning right onto a busy four lane road. He tries to turn left at an access road (clearly marked “no left turn”) as we continue straight. (at this point, Little Red Beemer guy is trying to get ahead of us and other traffic, by making his illegal turn… if that makes any sense at all.)
We continue through the light and have the immense pleasure of driving past him stopped on the access road, waiting for traffic to clear. I waved. This happened several more times, as he switched lanes erratically, trying to get ahead of everyone, but he was constantly turned back by people turning, or stoplights.
That was nice.
I had an interesting experience along these lines, but nowhere near as confrontational. Between my driveway and my next door neighbor’s driveway is probably 11 feet of curb - just enough space to park the 10 foot long minivan my neighbor recently aquired. For some reason, she decided she needed three cars, so she parks two in the driveway and this van on in the street in this space. She could park in in front of her own house, or anywhere else on our virtually deserted street, but she chooses this spot. No big deal, it’s legal, so far so good, right?
Of course, with exactly six inches clearing each driveway at either end of this space, one is likely to get a little sloppy about parking. And of course she doesn’t like having to avoid her minivan every time she backs one of her other cars out of her driveway, it’s a pain. Solution? Park partway across *my * driveway. Just an overhang of a foot or two. I’ve got enough space, why not?
So now I have to manuver around this stupid minivan each morning. It’s a little thing, but it still pisses me off. She can park anywhere on the street, why is she doing this to me? I like my neighbor, she puts up with the sound of my band without complaining, she’s a nice lady, so I’m not going to confront her. Instead, one time she had the minivan out, I took the Sunday paper and stuck it in the street, right on the edge of my driveway, as if the paperboy got sloppy and didn’t quite throw it into the driveway like he usually does. Sort of a visual cue saying “Park past this point”. Passive aggressive, what can I say? It worked. She parked overhanging her own damn driveway for once.
And now the beautiful part… later that day she pulled out of her driveway in one of her other cars and backed straight into the minivan. Hard. Smashed both cars to crap, and had to have them towed away. She only has one car now.
A couple of years ago, I had to attend the funeral of my best friend’s mother. It was a miserable disaster start to finish, as I had checked the train times the night before, to be sure I’d get the right local train to connect with the 2 hour express train, but then the guy selling me the ticket that morning gave me the wrong information, causing me to miss the express.
I ended up walking (a blonde foreigner) into a solemn buddhist funeral 45 minutes late, then getting a train back again 45 minutes after that. It was awful - you do NOT be late for funerals here.
When I got back to our little local station, I found that I had been blocked in by some selfish bastard. I had parked in one of two rows, as is the custom on the bit of waste ground that everyone uses (so no actual rules, unfortunately) and this prat had parked alongside me.
I was close to weeping - I’d been bottled up, frustrated, humiliated and sad for about 6 hours, was dressed head to foot in black, wearing high heels and had about 40 minutes to get the car out to pick my kids up from two different schools several miles away. And no money because I’d got taxis to the funeral instead of the bus at the other end… It was early afternoon and most of the people who park there are commuters, who come back late at night.
Soooo I weighed up the situation and realised that there was about 6 inches not enough space to get out, that the car blocking me in was one of those little plasticy narrow wheel base ones, and my car was a 12 year old big thing due to be replaced in a year or so.
So I just drove through the hole, being very careful not to scrape the innocent car in front of me.
Got home, told my husband, who went out to look at our car - there was a HUGE scrape of the other car’s paint down the entire side of our car… Ah well, it polished out.
I live next to an auto racing facility that hosts an NHRA national race every year. UP to about 10 years ago when a new parking area was put in, there was a definite lack of parking, especially on Sunday. The first year we lived in the house my family and I returned from a day at a lake to find 3 cars parked in my driveway. A call to the sheriff’s office resulted in a couple of tow trucks showing up and towing away 2 of the offending vehicles. The third was left unlocked, me and a couple neighbors pushed it up the street a few houses. An hour later there was knocking at the door and a couple of guys wanted to know where their cars were. I gave them the cards the tow truck drivers gave me and said to give them a call. They of course were not happy. They called me a bunch of names and one threatened to kick my ass. Then they realized they needed a phone. Kiss my ass buddy, the nearest pay phone is 5 miles away. Have a nice walk.
BUILD. A. GIANT. CRATE. AROUND. IT!
That’s AWESOME!
I’m thinking a pre-fab chain-link fence complete with HUGE padlock on the gate.
HaHaHa
“What Car?”
One more school-related driveway story:
Once upon a time the local school district, in its infinite wisdom, decided to locate a school bus stop right in front of our driveway. This was not good, as all the little schoolkiddies would congregate in the driveway, and all the way up our driveway to the house, making cheery kiddie noises, dropping litter etc. The situation was also posing potential liability problems (beyond the risk of running into unseen child while exiting the driveway, what if a kid falls on slightly uneven driveway paving, stumbles into rose bushes lining the driveway and gets scratched etc.?). So the next time the school bus stopped there, I went out and had a brief chat with the driver, explaining the hazards and suggesting that he stop about 50 feet up the street, still in front of our house but not right in the driveway. He said it sounded reasonable but that I had to contact the school board.
The kicker is that Clueless Non-Soccer Mom from across the street then ran over to harangue the driver about how he should continue stopping in front of our driveway (apparently it was convenient for her to keep an eye on her brats from her window, and the new location was out of her sight line).
The driver wound up moving the stop up the street on his own initiative (and brains). The school board turned down the move, but the driver ignored their stupidity or never got the word, so the new stop remained in force.