Ahh yes… Parking disputes. A source of disputation between neighbors for as long as man has employed means of vehicular transport that needed to be stored somewhere in times of disuse. The need for storage space has long been a source of petty territorial badgering, especially when your neighbor has stored their carriage in the most convenient part of the communal space where you had been intending to store yours. The level-headed thing to do would be to park yours in the less convenient place…

The willingness of superiors to apply rules to themselves that they make for others speaks volumes to the character and quality of an organization. An undercurrent of issues surrounding fairness in leadership can give you a great indication of the toxicity of the workplace. This reaches levels of ridiculousness that can't be rationalized when it begins involving matters that aren't even specifically related to your performance or time that you spend at work and begins leaching into personal and…

One of the perks of living in a quaint neighborhood are the kind neighbors. It gives you a feeling of secuirty and safety, being surrounded by all these people who you usually at least know on a first name basis. So what happens when someone moves in and lives in their own little entitled world?

There will be plenty of times in your life when things seem completely unfair. Plenty of these times will involve incorrectly awarded parking infringements… Should this tenant have just moved their vehicle like everyone else so that the snow plow could do a clean sweep of the lot? Sure. But, by the time they had gotten out there and removed the remaining snow from around their vehicle that should have been the end of it. Just because a rule exists doesn't mean it needs to be enforced to the let…

Constant proximity to other people—without any recourse or avenues for escape—is maddening. I guarantee, if you were locked in a room, even with your favorite person in the world, it wouldn't take long (and even less time than you'd think) before you'd grow sick of the sight of them and tired of the sound of their voice, wishing their mouth would stay shut every time they breathed. Say now, that you don't even like this person. Worse yet, you have your entire life savings and livelihood investe…

In stories, when a character has done something wrong or displays a glaring personality flaw, there's generally a direct price that is played at some point in the story, usually soon thereafter. In life, there are relatively few times when the lesson or moral to the story of your wrongful actions is quite so clear. No, usually, we get away with being generally lazy, cruel, entitled, or plain old wrong for far too long before that karmic pendulum swings back in our direction… sometimes, we may e…

There's something startling about being accused of slighting someone and doing them wrong—especially when you don't even have any idea what they're talking about. Maybe it's the actual confrontation itself; maybe it's just your mind trying to make sense of it all, but usually, you're going to find yourself caught too off guard to formulate a proper response to the events that are unfolding in front of you.

What is it about perceived petty slights, such as another driver cutting us off in traffic, that drive us into such a rage? Instances that, if we chose instead not to react, would go by completely inconsequentially and unnoticed by us. Usually, the idea of face-to-face confrontation alone will cause those who would otherwise want to take issue with another's behavior to quail. But while seated in a car, that thin layer of anonymity and safety provided to us by our steel box with glass windows e…

Humans have long waged war over finite resources—like toilet paper and parking spaces—willing to come to blows over a rectangle of processed paper or a rectangle of asphalt that's marginally closer to a store entrance than that other rectangle area of asphalt at the back of the lot. Yeah, we're just kind of wired that way—monkeys feuding over territory and resources. At the first sign that we might miss out on something due to its limited availability, we're compelled by the overwhelming desire…

It's an important lesson to learn early in life that the things that aren't yours—well, they aren't—and you have not a single darn right to them. Should you choose to help yourself to those things anyway, you'll soon find there are consequences, and these only get worse as you get older. If you help yourself to a candy bar at the grocery store, you'll be in for the humiliation of your young life when your parent makes you go back and tell the cashier what you've done but when you're a fully gro…

In life, it's not worth worrying about the little things, especially when there are much bigger things to worry about… Yet, each neighborhood somehow manages to have that one neighbor who has nothing important to worry about and spends their days obsessing over petty details and perceived slights, plotting about how they're going to hold their neighbors accountable for that single blade of grass that went unmowed, or that leaf that blew over the property line that one time three summers ago.

When you come home to find a strange car parked in your driveway or assigned parking space, there really isn't much more to be done than to go through the proper procedure for having that car ticketed and towed. Of course, if you're feeling generous and know your neighbor owns the car, it might be the neighborly thing to do to give them a heads-up or a reminder that they've parked in your space. You never know. There could be some kind of emergency going on, like they could have really needed t…

There's something inherently unbalanced about one person or a for-profit organization having (relatively) unchecked control over whether or not someone has a roof over their head. Even after having direct control over how often the tenant has to move, they can also directly influence the tenant's success in finding a new home when forced to—thanks to the “all-important” tenant referral system that is pivotal in determining whether or not other landlords will rent to them. Should the tenant have…

Parking cartels usually utilize a clever mix of feigned incompetence, actual incompetence, and diffused and dispersed responsibility in their organizations to ensure that no one ever has any idea what's actually going on or what their job is. So, when ticketed people come to dispute their tickets, they never really get anywhere because it's apparently nobody's actual job to help them with their dispute.

Few government agencies carry out their tasks with as much zeal and reckless abandon as local parking enforcement. Park your vehicle in the wrong place, and you can guarantee that they'll be there—watching, waiting, with foam frothing around their mouth—you'll have a ticket on your windscreen faster than a prairie fire with a tailwind. But sometimes, it doesn't matter if you parked in the wrong place… Sometimes, you still get ticked despite doing everything you possibly could have. And, once th…