What the hell?

It's hard to make this out with the cell phone pic, but above is the lovely Toyota Sienna (or "FancyCar," as Messy Jr. calls it), bought just two weeks ago, with a huge gash all the way down the passenger side door. Someone keyed it. Fucker.

This is a horrendously large gash. It starts at the handle of the passenger door, goes all along the side of the door, and continues past the door toward the back bumper. I couldn't believe that someone could be filled with such Jack-the-Ripper like rage, and thought that maybe someone must have just scratched it while they were negligently backing up from the space next to me in a parking lot. But there's a second (or perhaps a first?) gash just below the big one (doesn't come up in the pic) -- it was on purpose. The perp must have known this car or been sexually humiliated by it.

It happened at the parking lot near the Metro. When we were a one-car family, I was usually dropped off at the Metro station. But my early DC days when I had my 10 year old Corrolla, and for the last two weeks, I've been periodically driving to the Metro, parking in the multi-storied municipal parking garage. Silver Spring is a little strange -- I believe that it was the tony DC suburban commercial area in the late 60s and early 70s. I think it started to get run down toward the late 70s and early 80s. I may be off by a half-decade on each part. The Metro opened up its stop in Silver Spring only in 1978. Anyway, my theory is that they built a ton of parking garages, thinking to the future and expecting the trend of Silver Spring as "the" suburb to continue. But everything soon fled to Bethesda and Northern Virginia, abandoning Silver Spring and making it even more run down. All of this is to say that there's a crazy overabundance of parking garages in the area. They long ago removed the attendant booth and made all the spaces metered. They shut down half of the Metro garage for repairs a few months ago, and all it means is that I have to get a space on the third floor (of nine) instead of the second floor.

Which brings me to my point. Considering the likely age of the garage (late 70s), the spaces are way too narrow for todays cars, er... SUVs. If you have, say a Toyota Sienna, you have to park absolutely perfectly to stay less than an inch from the yellow lines on each side. In the post above is a pic of how tight the spaces are, if you park perfectly.

But no one parks perfectly. It's the morning rush, etc. Judging by the other cars, the rule seems to be that if you are on your side of the yellow line, you're fine. Anyway, I apparently parked to close to comfort for the asshole next to me. Jeez, what's the frickin' big deal? If you want a space with absolutely no one near you, park on the 8th floor! O rjust give me the finger in absentia or something.

Sadly, this is the second run-in with cowardly parking assholes at this very garage. And I've suffered for my parking conduct on opposite ends of the spectrum. When I had the Corrolla, with which I parked through many a tight, unmarked parking space at college requiring pushing back the rearview mirrors and climbing out the back passenger seat, I went to the Silver Spring garage and encountered two SUVs overhanging their spaces with a vacant, but infringed, space in between. I chose to park in that vacant space. This apparently enraged one of the two SUVers, because when I got back, there was a note written in highlighter(!) taped to my trunk that said "I flunked parking school" and my passenger-side tires were slashed. I tried to change the tire myself , but couldn't dislodge it. I called AAA, but they couldn't do it either. The tire had basically rusted itself to a point where it couldn't be removed, at least not by a mobile tow unit. Also turned out that they didn't slash the tire, they just removed all the air. So I guess that was nice. But it also required more effort on their part. At least they left a note. Kind of.

But now I get screwed either way. Park next to some space hog, get a tire slashed. Park two inches over the line, get keyed. It's a little ridiculous.