Don't fence me in!

Or in this case, don't box me in.

So, the parking lot outside the shop is a little difficult. There are no lines to divide spaces and parking is so limited with all the other shops being viciously territorial about their spaces that people sort of just squeeze in where ever they fit. We also get a lot of people using the parking lot who do not think about others when they park, they'll park sideways, or extremely close to neighbouring cars, or they'll leave their ass end sticking out into the driving part of the lot so that you have to squeeze between them and the parked cars on the street or the lamp post.

After a couple of months of watching car doors bash into my car and cringing as I just barely scraped past the cars parked next to be as I backed out of my spot in the evening, and then fighting to get onto the street during rush hour while competing with blocked sight lines from the cars parked along the street I finally decided to park on the street myself. It's one of the few situation where I thought my car would be safer on the busy street than in the parking lot.

Except now there is this new problem. Now that I'm parking on the street people who show up later in the day (I'm always the first one here. The joys of being the only business on the block open for hours in the morning) will pull right smack up against my bumper in the rear and reverse right against my bumper in the front. The people in the rear are trying to keep the driveway clear and are pulling into a space that is too short for them and the people in the front are giving themselves plenty of room to pull forward and out with no consideration to the fact that I can't pull forward and out now.

The other day I hopped into my car and then realized I was almost completely unable to move. I could get out, sure, but it took a lot of back and forth and steering and back and forth. Generally this would be an annoyance, but not a huge problem, except for the fact that at the hour I am going home this road is very very busy, which means slowly working your nose out into traffic isn't a super awesome idea and it's also really frustrating to miss gap after gap in traffic because pulling out now, or too quickly, might result in ripping smashing headlights while ripping the bumper off the car parked in front.

So two days in a row now I have parked in front of my shop, on the street, so that there is less than two metres from my back bumper to the driveway. The driveways are tricking and hard to get in and out of as well, so I try to take up enough room to defend my space so I can back up and pull onto the street when I leave, but not so much room that I make it hard for people to get in and out of the driveway and risk my car while they do so. And for two days now I have peeked out the front window to discover, despite the still very empty street parking and parking lot in the earlier hours of the morning, that someone thinks they're driving a smart car and has wedged their car tight up against my back bumper while taking up a third of the driveway with their ass end.

If I move back a bit they'll probably just block the whole driveway, but maybe they'd get towed for that...

Funny/awful thing is, now that I have stopped using one of my two parking spaces no one uses either of them. It's like they think you're not allowed to park there any more.

.