Like most college students, I value sleep more than just about anything. Every second of sleep counts. So when my alarm begins wailing for me to get up, I sluggishly roll out of bed and get ready and leave for school. Because I am not a morning person my first class begins at 9:35 a.m. Anyone who drives knows that being at school that “late” means getting a crappy parking spot.
I understand this though, and while I am not the most patient of people, I can say that trying to find a decent parking spot brings out all my inner demons. I get so frustrated with the way idiots at our school decide to park their vehicles that I frequently envision driving a military Humvee and ramming into the nitwits who park, well, like nitwits.
Parking here at Bakersfield College is a classic example of Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory. The passive will never survive. They will be the ones who get to park way in the back and have to walk 15 minutes just to get to class.
The aggressive, though, have no rules. They fly through the parking lot, risking either an accident or hitting a pedestrian. With one goal in mind, they are ruthless.
As Darwin’s theory states, those who do not adapt, perish. So we passive drivers must become one of the aggressive.
We become animals and just as a pack of vultures circles a dead carcass, we swarm and hover around the parking lots looking for our prey to feast on, willing to injure anyone else who attempts to claim our target as their own.
Driving around the parking lot, I begin to feel myself getting angrier, and as I glance at the clock I will be arriving later and later to my class. Knuckles white, I grip the steering wheel tighter. My heart pounds with excitement because I have found just what I have been looking for. Eyes narrowed and focused, I rev the engine and attempt to race to that perfect spot. However some jerk driving a Nissan gets there a few seconds before me and steals that precious spot I have been eying.
Through this parking experience I have determined that here at BC we have three different types of dimwitted parkers.
The first type are the people who feel their car is far too expensive or too large to only park in one parking spot, so they intentionally take two spaces. Of course, the people who drive these vehicles are far better than the average Joe and must take these spaces right up front instead of being courteous and parking in the back where they could take two spaces and no one would care. These parkers tease the rest of us because they leave a small amount of space where it looks like we could fit, but once we try to park, we find that even our small economy cars won’t make it in the space they left.
The second type of parker is the person who parks directly on the line or a little over it. They are too lazy to back out and re-park their vehicle, and this causes the person who parks next to them to park far to the side as well. It becomes so bad down the line that eventually that there are spaces being taken up that could have been three or four more parking places.
Finally, the third type of brainless parker is the one who parks on the speed bumps, henceforth, not allowing traffic to pass through that area.
In my seven months at BC, I have discovered that if I’m going to sleep in, then I must sacrifice getting a prime parking spot. I have accepted this and now walk a bit faster to my class. I have realized that it saves me time and anger and I get a decent amount of exercise.
I still get frustrated, however, when I walk by cars and see them parked foolishly. So, I ask that all students take the time to realize that they are not the only ones who park. If you get here early, or even late, as tempting as it may be, don’t park like an asshole.