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…