Yeah, a fellow church member got extremely offended when my grandmother got a sticker and started parking in “her spot.” Completely ignoring the fact that it’s the lady’s HUSBAND that needs the sticker and she comes to church by herself. Evidently she’s so contrary she’s taken to parking in the loading zone now as to not walk the extra 10 feet from a regular parking spot because, “Our car has the sticker!”
How very Christian of her. Perhaps a word with the pastor, and maybe a sermon about “giving up for those who are in need” or whatever, might be in order.
(Not a rat out-she’s stealing my spot! More like, “I have noticed that people who are not entitled to it are using the handicapped spot, taking it away from those in need. Perhaps some6thing could done about this?”)
It’s smitin’ season.
Bless you for the comic relief of that story! A friend of mine has MS and is now able to move only a few fingers. That is all. Yet he still goes out to dinner with his wife and friends in his equiped van. Imagine our frustration when a delivery truck illegally took the only spot where he could disembark.
I was thinking I hope they left black tire marks on the rug.
A cursory glance at the OT suggests this must be one of those there rhetorical questions. 
I spent almost 6 months on crutches after surgery and this kind of shit happens all the time. I can’t count the number of times I saw someone park in the only handicapped spot and run into the store. I saw people who would pull into a handicapped spot and one would run in, and the other would sit in the and give the ‘go on, start something’ stare to anyone who walked by. I saw people who regularly parked in the handicapped spots in a parking garage without a tag, and bragged about it, because the garage didn’t check.
Same thing with those electric carts at the grocery store. I only got to use them a few times because they were always being used by whatever lazy dogwipe happened to decide they wanted one.
People wouldn’t just take handicapped spots, they flaunted it, they dared you to say something. They knew they were being assholes and were proud of it. I’m personally in favor of the ‘making these dipshits handicapped’ method of correction. Preferably via blunt trauma delivered by large burly men.
Important thing to remember is that not everyone who is handicapped *looks * handicapped.
My SO has an aquired brain injury as a result of a horrific accident years ago. She looks fine when she gets out of her car, fine when she smiles and chats with people, and not so fine when she has a sudden seizure and needs to crawl back to her car to get her meds.
She’s gotten a lot of nasty looks when she parks in the handicapped spots for not looking disabled enough. We’ve both gotten nasty looks when we both get out of the car. Of course none of the folks who give us nasty looks are interested in helping out when I need to carry her back through the mall to the car as she’s experiencing spasms of pain.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit a while back where they filmed people getting out of their cars in handicapped spots and saying “Do these people look handicapped?” Really upset my SO. She kept saying ‘do they really think I *want * this?’
The guy in the OP may be a jerk. Or he may not want to tell anyone about his disability, so he says it’s his wife, not him. He may be walking fast in order to get to his office before he has a seizure. You can’t know, and it isn’t really your business.
For the record, I don’t use my SO’s handicap pass when she isn’t in the car, or when she’s not getting out of the car, or if there’s a spot pretty close to the handicap spots so I can leave them available for someone else. People who abuse their handicap passes are dirtbags. But you can’t tell the dirtbags from the real disabled by looking at them.
Um, I sincerely hope that there’s more to this you haven’t described, but why is someone who has incapacitating seizures driving?
I had a friend in HS who was deaf. Hard to tell just by looking at her…
As you guess, there’s more to it that I haven’t described. We use the word ‘seizure’ to describe what she experiences because it is a word people immediately recognize and understand. Most head injury victims experience a variety of one-of-a-kind symptoms, because head injuries are not uniform or well understood. In her case a ‘seizure’ is an extremely painful and debilitating headache which comes on pretty quickly over the course of about five minutes or so. She restricts her driving to short distances, say a couple miles, and if one comes on, she has enough time to find a place to pull over.
That’s the four sentence description. There’s more to it than that even, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking to her doctor and recognizing limitations, we’ve taken precautions inside the car to reduce the impact of any triggering stimuli. I might write more about it someday, but I’m not going to put her entire medical history on a pit thread.
The good news is that the entire country is about to learn a lot more about head injury victims and what kinds of things they have to deal with. The bad news is that the reason the country is about to learn about this is because the vast majority of long term injuries our veterans are bringing home from Iraq are similar head injuries. Cite
Are you suggesting that people who are deaf should get to park in handicapped parking spots?
I personally haven’t, but several of my coworkers have met his wife and confirm that she has a physical disability.
And like I’ve said - I’ve been working with this guy for years. At first? Yes, you are absolutely correct that not all disabilities are immediately apparent (I said this in the OP). But after years - man, if there’s something that makes this guy need the spot, it hasn’t shown itself once.
Can I ever be 100% sure that he’s just a tool and is abusing his tags? No. But I’m 99% sure and asking him “Hey, do you have a disability?” could easily get me fired.
So instead I rant on the internets…
I do remember it. But it’s a bit hard to accept that the “perfectly fit-looking and -acting but nonetheless handicapped” outnumber those with any evident issue by, say, 12 to 1. (Which is approximately what the ratio would need to be if we assume that all handicap-parkers are fully legal.)
I think he’s probably not handicapped – the OP has observed him for a long, long time, not just across a parking lot – but still, it isn’t logical to say you know he doesn’t need a preventative measure because you’ve never seen it fail.
Fair enough. My comment was more inspired by the tone of the thread rather than your specific post (although I did single yours out as it was the OP.)
The first guy I ever rode with who had one of these tags was a guy in his mid 50’s who had heart trouble, and had three months to live. He’d kept himself in good shape in an effort to keep as much time as possible. He looked in terrific shape, right up until the end. I wonder how many ignoramouses gave him rude glares for daring to use the handicap space when he didn’t look disabled enough. Think of him next time you see one of these people.
On Edit: The disabled folks who work hard to keep themselves in shape so they can go out and enjoy life are probably disproportionally represented when you observe handicap spot occupants.
Or maybe, just maybe there is a teeny, tiny chance that the guy described by the OP is a big jerk.
My WAG would say for every 1 person with an invisible handicap, there are 20 - 30 jerks. YMMV.
However, I don’t give the stink-eye to anyone who parks in a handicapped spot and is not actually in an iron lung.
(My wife is deaf in one ear… does that mean I get half of a handicapped parking spot? Whoooooo!!!)
Well, she had a tag, so I guess the state of CA considered it a handicap. She never considered it a handicap, though. 
IIRC, in Illinois to qualify for a handicapped hanger you have to have a condition which prevents you from walking a certain distance without assistance or risk to your health. The condition can be temporary, which would be reflected by the expiration date of the tag. To get a handicapped plate, the handicapped person must be the owner and/or primary driver of the vehicle, and the condition must be long-term or permanent. We had handicapped plates for our van, since my wife was the driver. After she died, I had to turn in the handicapped plates and the tag we had in case she rode with someone.