It’s been a stressful week. My mum was rushed into hospital last Thursday with severe back pain, and it turns out she has fractures in her spine. They say it will heal, but she’s still in pain and on powerful painkillers as a result of the manipulations necessary when she has a scan or physiotherapy.
I’ve been visiting her daily, and I use the Queen’ Medical Centre (QMC) car parks. At night that isn’t much of a problem, but during the day I want to get out and punch people for being so stupid in those car parks.
I usually go in off the A52 (other routes are congested during the day and early evening, especially with the A52 Derby Road being closed for the next three months, because of sodding Cadent again), then circle the whole campus to get into the main car park, where there are more likely to be spaces. The problems start at Car Park No. 1 (near the East Block). It isn’t a very big one and is invariably full, but people still queue to get in, preventing others moving further through the campus. They will actually block the road indefinitely in the hope the ‘FULL’ sign goes out. Then there is the Treatment Centre multi-storey car park. You can only use that if you have an appointment at the Treatment Centre iself, but you have to go past it to access Car Park No. 3 (the main one), and people queue for that, too. I was stuck there for ten minutes yesterday, and finally overtook the queue to get by.
But today, I couldn’t believe what I saw in Car Park No. 3. There were actually quite a few parking spaces when I went at just after 1pm. But as most readers will probably know, parking even a few metres further away from where you’d like to park is totally unacceptable if you are a fucking idiot, like the one in the photos here, and this means you’ll park wherever you want – however you want.
As I drove through, I’d identified at least six parking spaces I could use if necessary. But I followed the route they have now introduced and looped around – only to be blocked by the utter prat who had parked like this.
They hadn’t parked in a bay. And they hadn’t parked straight. In fact, it looked for all the world as if they had purposely left their car in the diagonal position across the road route in order to block people in. I had to carefully reverse back around sharp corners (watching for other traffic) as a result. I’d have had to mount the footpath to get past otherwise.
I doubt that they will do anything, but I am reporting it. The annoying thing is, if I parked crooked or outside of a bay even half as badly, I’d probably end up being ‘spoken with’. Yet these sleazebags get away with it and mess things up for everyone else.
Update: I went in again on 2 February and this was in the same location as the idiot above, blocking the thoroughfare.
