Neighborhood Norms and Rants

 

So this is what it looks like where I live.  Except not really, but you get the main point.  We have two buildings side by side.  We have underground garages where people park most of their cars.  See the little black lines at the top of the fun picture are additional parking spaces, even though that is not exactly super clear from my awesome Paint drawing.

The key here is that when you exit from the parking garage, you run into a one-way.  If you're coming out of the garage, you MUST TURN LEFT.  Only, people don't like to turn left because then they have to go an extra quarter of a mile on Lake Street to get to the easiest exit out of the neighborhood.  These people, we will call them The Assholes, they turn right.

That was okay until this happened.

And now there are huge piles of snow against every bank making that one-way IMPOSSIBLE to navigate if cars are going in the wrong fucking direction.  So if I pull into the one-way off of Kathleen Drive, being a legal beagle, and one of The Assholes has turned right coming from the garages, I make them back up until I get to the garage because they can't go around me.  I am so mean and I'm waiting for our car to get keyed in the garage because of this behavior.

(I know I am lucky.  I have never had a garage before we lived here, let alone a heated underground garage and I thank my lucky stars every day that I don't have to scrape off my car or dig it out, but this seriously ticks me off.  And I deal with it every freaking day.)

So it's just a cultural norm, I guess. The Assholes go the wrong way and they never get in trouble with it.

But let's look at another cultural norm I do not like in our neighborhood. People do not pick up their dog shit.  There is crap everywhere. There are a lot of dogs here and I really like that aspect of living here. It is a rare day that I don't get to pet a dog or have a dog come up to me and sniff me.  But I don't like that I have to be constantly vigilant with my every footfall (sidewalk or not) so that I don't have to come home and clean the bottom of my shoes with a level of bleach that is unhealthy.

That's all. I've been sitting on this for a long time and my husband thinks I get irrationally upset about it, so I had to vent somewhere.