Every once in a while, you hear about a missing child or dog … that was in the car when the driver/parent/owner ran ‘briefly’ into the convenience store to buy a pack of smokes or something.
If it should be obvious not to leave your car running when you step away, we need a better word (than ‘obvious’) to describe doing it with a child or a pet still inside.
At my old employer, 6 parking tickets on hospital grounds was in itself grounds for dismissal. Some people did make jokes about getting fired for parking tickets, but think about it - parking in a restricted space for which one wasn’t authorized, and getting caught SIX TIMES, would be indicative of other issues.
One of my college roommates sometimes drove to campus, and if she parked at a meter, would usually put 50 minutes’ worth of change in it, the exact length of her class, and then wondered why she would get a ticket. D’oh! Put a few extra minutes’ worth of time on it.
This happened to my dad, he dropped my mom off at work not realizing that she had the fob to the car he was driving and he had the other set of keys in his pocket. Stopping at a store on the way home was the wrong move that day.