I've become that which I hate!

It's true, and I'm not happy about it.

I live in a townhome community, and like many such communities, we do not have individual mailboxes at our units. Rather, there is a central station where all the mailboxes for the neighborhood are housed. I don't live right next to the mailboxes, so I try to avoid having to walk to it very often. This is done relatively easily, by simply driving up to the station and getting my mail each day when I come home from work. Many other people seem to take the same strategy, because I very often have other people show up while I'm out getting my mail.

So, here's the thing. Every unit has 2 dedicated parking spaces in the lot that are numbered, and then there are visitor spaces scattered throughout the lot. 5 of the visitor spaces are adjacent to the mailboxes, and typically no more than 1 or 2 (if that) are occupied in the late afternoon, early evening. So, my typical routine is to pull into the closest parking space, hop out and get my mail, and then return to my car.

Such a routine, however, is evidently not quick enough for certain of my neighbors. They prefer to pull up right beside the mailbox station, and temporarily park there, still in the road. I can't stand this, for a number of reasons. First of all, the road at that point is barely wide enough for two lanes even without someone parked there. So, if I come up to the mailboxes as someone is parked there, it can get to be a mess if someone is coming the other way. Secondly, if I'm already at the mailboxes and parked in the first visitor spot, someone sitting in that spot blocks my standard path for backing out to leave. And finally, they also block my view of any other vehicle that might be coming around them as I try to back out. It's not legal, and seems a rather unsafe way to go about saving the 5 seconds it might take to pull into and then out of one of the spaces.

On Thursday, when I came home, the contractors installing the fiber optic lines had hijacked a couple of the spots, and there were people parked in the other 2. So, horror of horrors, I "had" to park alongside the mailboxes, like so many people that I have grumbled at before. The internet outage almost prevented me from bringing this story to you, but then the situation repeated itself today when I returned home from a tubing trip with some other young adult from my church.

So, I'm very frustrated about this. I do comfort myself knowing that mine is a "crime" of necessity (sort of), but still, it grates at me each time I have to engage in this practice. Here's hoping the contractors move on along with their stuff very soon!