Students Share Parking Mishaps and Experiences
October 17, 2017
From the tight spaces in the garage to the infamous yellow mark that decorates the doors of many students’ cars, the majority of upperclassmen know the struggles of parking around Prep. With that, there are bound to be a few funny parking mishaps. Here are a couple of those stories:
Henry Hazzard ’18 parks in a very tight space that is located next to a pole. One time, he hit the pole and it left a huge yellow scratch on his car that he says was the size of his hand. “I was nervous,” stated Henry. “Last time I scratched the car, my dad gave me a lecture about that stuff.”
Another moment that Hazzard had was when someone stole his parking spot. He shares that he had to drop his carpool off and then drive all the way to 12th street just to find a parking spot and he ended up being late to class.
During the beginning of the year, Junior Gracie Cole and her parking neighbor Mira Wellington ’18 had a funny parking story.
Wellington parks in between a pole and another car so she has very limited space. One day, Gracie parked more towards her side. Because of the amount of space that she had left, Mira had a difficult time parking into her spot.
A couple days later, Gracie found a friendly note after school saying “thanks for giving me more space today” since she parked farther away from her car that day. “I laughed [when I saw the note],” says Gracie. “The next day I made sure to give her extra space.”
As Senior Ashley Mah was trying to position her car into her tight parking spot, she says she bumped into a car trying to reverse, bumped into a different car while driving forward, bumped into the yellow pole reversing once again, and then finally drove away.
Mah expresses that she “felt bad and scared to tell my dad and scared to see the damage done.”
Traffic Coordinator Matt Burks has seen it all. One incident that he vividly remembers is the story of a girl who parked in between two faculty cars a couple of years ago.
According to Burks, the girl hit both sides of her own car on the sides of the two other cars. He thinks that she ended up crawling out of her window and then went on vacation.
To get rid of the parking “epidemic,” Burks advises to “slow down, stay off phones, pay attention, and learn how to back into a spot .”
Because of the many parking issues, it may be time to make a change to the school’s parking garage. Mayme Krueger ’19 suggests to have “bigger parking spaces and cushioning for the corners of the huge poles.”