I’m quoting this post in its entirety because I agree with every paragraph. QFT. (By which I mean, if I agree with it, it must be true! 
)
Ya rly. If that were me, I’d have thought to myself “Cool your jets, lady,” and that would have been the end of it. My brother is disabled, and I still don’t think what the OP did was the worst thing in the world. I know in threads like these everyone comes out the woodwork with a sister’s best friend’s baby’s mama’s cousin who has a disability, so they know what they’re talking about, but my brother actually has been disabled for the past seven years. Like for real, and not this “I once sprained my ankle after tripping over a cord” crap. When your brother is hospitalized then comes out months later without use of his legs, you notice (abysmally lacking) ADA compliance enough that you start to think this guy isn’t so bad, even though almost all of his law suits were entirely fraudulent. Even so, come the fuck on. A quick unload in a parking area with other available handicapped spots is the very antithesis of a “bfd.”
I almost never park illegally, and don’t think I’ve ever used a handicapped spot for any reason, but I’d be a liar if I said I’ve never parked illegally before. Hell yeah I’ve used loading zones when I wasn’t loading, and I may have even double parked for two minutes. I could have been blocking the vehicle of someone who was going into labor, but no one seems to get worked up into a lather about that. What is it about the words “handicapped spot” that bring out that froth?
Good. Ask any professional musicians you might know where to buy one.
I can see your point, but it’s the “there was a legal parking spot 15 feet away” part that still gets me. It’s like folks in DC and Baltimore who double park in traffic right next to an open legal parking spot.
To get offended when someone actually calls you on it is even sillier. This is just a fun trainwreck of a thread and it has been amusing to post in it.
They can’t afford one either 
The handicapped bathroom stall is not analogous. Those stalls are not intended to be reserved exclusively for people with disabilities, but are simply stalls made accessible to them. You are allowed to use the handicapped stalls. It’s not illegal. If no other option is available, it’s not even rude to make a person with disabilities wait their turn like everybody else (though, obviously, it would be rude to use that stall if another stall is available).
It’s akin the wheelchair ramps next to the steps outside. You can walk up the ramps if you want to, as long as you aren’t impeding anybody. They aren’t reserved exclusively for the disabled.
Those parking spits are.
Yeah, the 15 feet away thing is like, “Dude, come on” and getting antsy because a woman dared reprimand him for improper use of the handicapped space is a bit silly, but I can’t wrap my head around all the moral outrage that’s going on here over this benign infraction. This is the tiniest fd in the world.
This used to infuriate me when i lived in Baltimore.
My first few years there, i lived on Calvert Street, which is one of the main roads heading north out of downtown. It is a one-way street, with parking on either side of the road in addition to two lanes of northbound traffic.
Cars would constantly stop in one of the driving lanes when there were literally dozens of open parking spaces on the block. Delivery drivers (pizza, etc.) were especially bad, but plenty of other people did it too. Sometimes there would be someone blocking the left traffic lane, and then someone blocking the right traffic lane 30 yards further along, meaning that traffic not only had to filter into single file, it also had to slalom from one side to the other in order to get through.
Fucking insane.
When you posted to show this to be true (once at least) you didn’t show the grounds you used to win the appeal.
Perhaps where you live. Here, they are almost always full.
:dubious: Where did you learn to drive? There are all sorts of places you are not allowed under the law to park, not just handicapped spots.
You think that an able bodied person, who is apparently too lazy or too cheap to buy a hand truck, has precedence over a handicapped person? Particularly when that lazy cheap able bodied person could have parked a mere 15 feet away legally?
Try being handicapped and you will see how wrong this statement is.
Well, I suppose because your story keeps changing. Also because at the time you parked in that spot, before you even left your car, you had no idea if that spot would be needed because you cannot see into the future. If the other two handicapped spots had filled up, there is no way you would have stopped what you were doing and moved to a non-handicapped spot, based on what you have said here. For some reason, you think lowering your inconvenience is more important than whether or not someone can actually shop, so I just don’t see you immediately leaving that handicapped spot when the other two filled up.
You backed up the whole time walking away from your car? Yeah, that’s silly, but so is your attempt to justify what you did, and trying to claim that you were looking at your car almost the whole time it was there. Also, if the door was that far away and you don’t have a problem with breaking the law and inconveniencing others, why didn’t you just park right next to the door?
So you are saying that if you had heard a car drive by, you would have raced out to see if it was a disabled person who needed your spot? :dubious:
The big deal is that the OP can do something about his “handicap”, i.e. buy a hand truck, get help, whatever. People with real handicaps are stuck with them.
:D:D
More or less what MsWhatsit said. I was just trying to construct a scenario on the extreme end where someone chastising him for parking there would not get as much crap for it. If the scenario isn’t extreme enough, I can make it moreso for the sake of the point, but it’s missing the point. For example, if we say the the next closest non-handicapped spot is also at the far end of the parking lot but there’s plenty of handicapped spots open, and not only is the item he’s unloading extremely heavy but it’s extremely expensive, and it’s pouring rain out and it could be irreparably damaged by water, and he’s still only in the spot only long enough to get the item out and under the awning, for all of about 30s, and immediately moves the vehicle to a regular spot at the end where he should park. Is that sufficiently extreme?
I may not be able to construct a situation where he’d receive zero crap, but the point was I think it’s a subjective value judgment, and I was just trying to establish extremes to, hopefully, illustrate that there are situations where one is absolutely being an asshole for using a handicapped spot and would get even more crap than this thread is getting, and one where probably most people would be okay with it and agree that the lady harping on him was silly, and obviously his story is somewhere in the middle.
Seriously, you can’t even imagine how there might possibly be an offense of a handicapped spot so minor compared to the cost an individual would have to give up not using it might seem reasonable to most people?
At that point, I’m pretty sure the answer is, “You’re fucking retarded for counting on the availability of illegal parking to be able to unload your equipment.”
I was trying to actually make a point about social norms and subjective judgment calls with balancing the needs/wants of oneself against those of others. I wasn’t even trying to justify the behavior of the individual in my example; in fact, I have said more than once that I don’t think the OP is justified in using the spot. I was hopeful that maybe I could help the OP understand why he was getting the response in this thread that he was.
But it seems that there’s more interest in hating on him instead of having any kind of discussion about it, so I give up.
I think the least understandable part of the OP is the fact that he wasn’t expecting the reaction he got, despite being a member for - eh, can’t be bothered to scroll back and check - a long time now.
Yeah, I caught that right now on the re-read. Sorry, it’s the end of the day and my brain is shutting down, so I somehow blew by the actual point of your post and just responded to the hypothetical.
I got what you were saying to begin with. My statement was a criticism of people’s ability to turn their rage-o-meter up to infinity over any usage of the handicapped space, no matter the duration or circumstances. The building could have been on fire, and he was rushing in to save his grandmother, and they would have been like “How do you know ten handicapped people weren’t going to rush in at that exact moment to save their grandmothers too, you selfish asshole?” There doesn’t seem to be any scenario that would not elicit this amount of outrage. But maybe I’m wrong, and have misjudged this crowd of good looking people.
Dear Broomstick. Thank you for showing up late to the party. What took you so long, did someone park in your handicapped spot?
Sorry, but I don’t have time to re-hash arguments I’ve already had with other people; if you’re going to jump back to page fucking number one of the thread and demonstrate your total abject horror and outrage outrage about it, knock yourself out.
One would think. But the responses in this thread are at zero-tolerance levels.
Well, I’ve avoided it for a while because my small car often does not have room for everything that I need to bring to a gig. But, every time I carry the keyboard I get nervous about dropping it, and nervous about hurting my back. Hearing "hand truck . . . hand truck . . . hand truck . . . " does make me think, “what the fuck am I waiting for; something to actually happen? Get a hand truck!”
As satisfying a story as it might make, I can’t say it had much to do with the real substance of this thread. But, thanks, Troppus for being a reasonable human being in this thread.
Ok.
“Hey, Eonwe, where do I go to buy a hand truck?”
Oh, I see, haha, you were insinuating I wasn’t a professional, because you think I’m an asshole, and so irrelevant and inaccurate attempts to insult any element of my person are totally fair game. In the thread where everyone is accusing me of lacking moral control and direction. How clever you are.
No, you’re right. At that point I turn around and go home. Then I get on the phone and call my place of employment and say, “gee, sorry, there wasn’t any place near by to unload so I turned around and went home.” At which point my employer says, “why the fuck didn’t you just double park or pull up on the curb and do what you needed to do!? You’re fired!”
So, go for it. Ask me your questions. Let’s see how brilliant your expose is.
Here’s the thing, though, **MOL **(site note: Hi! I missed you!): *That is **never *the scenario in these threads. It’s always, 100% of the time, some lazy asshole who couldn’t be bothered to walk another 50 feet. Some precious snowflake who thinks their particular “special circumstance” (read: lack of planning) means that they get to break the law and nobody else can be mad at them for it. Never once have I seen it be an *actual *emergency.
Of course, if you can turn up any example of a time here where someone did have an actual need to park in a handicapped spot and got reamed by another poster for it, I’ll happily retract this and agree that said reamer is a moron who can’t appreciate complexity.
My god, your life is soooooo haaaaaaaard, isn’t it?
Heh. I might have engaged in slight hyperbole, and am pretty sure even the zero-tolerance crowd would make an allowance for a fire (maybe), but the point was pretty much anything short of a life-or-death situation results in InstaRage™. I don’t park in handicapped spaces, and I’m lazy as fuck, and also generally disapprove of people who do for their own convenience, but to use a spot where there were plentiful handicapped spaces available to unload for literally less than five minutes on the Dick Move Scale of 1-10 rates a solid “Meh.”
Edit: But my other point, re: Blaster Master was I heard him loud and clear, but just don’t think mitigating circumstances would have mitigated the rage.
So, ok, I am a liar? Please explain to me how my story has changed. The one “change” to my story, which happened four or five pages ago, was that I didn’t mean to argue that I was right to park in the spot.
Neither can you say for sure that a meteor isn’t going to hit the Earth tomorrow and take out Topeka. But I bet you feel pretty comfortable assuming so.
You’re a tool. I’m sorry if you’ve been burned by assholes before. But here’s the thing. I have said explicitly “If someone came and asked I would move.” If you want to tell me that you know me better and no I wouldn’t because I’m an ASSHOLE, waaaahh waaah!, then go ahead. I was wrong then, and you are calling me a liar. Screw you. And, clearly you can’t be bothered to read the thread; this took place by a music building on a college campus. No one was there to go shopping. Once again, making up details that have nothing to do with the OP to prove what a jerk I am. Or does me pointing that out mean that I’m changing my story or back-pedaling?
Why do you say that?