Citizen’s arrest! That should go well!
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It is quite a tradition. My favorite is the used exercise equipment.
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I have a beast of a snowblower; a big ugly 1980s John Deere with lots of rust and chipped paint. It runs like a dream though. When we get hit with snow I fire it up and clear my neighbors driveways as well as about four houses worth of street parking. Is it because I’m a kind soul? Not necessarily. I just love playing with toys like the snowblower. Neighbors have offered to pay me but I refuse, other than a can of beer that my elderly neighbor Gail once gave me.
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Huh. Now that you mention it, no. It’s a north side thing. South side is much more ‘Southern’ in manners. We nod hello to strangers when we pass on on the street, etc. Partly the lack of dibs down here is due to having fewer cars, too.
But to be brutally honest, there’s much more of a sense of entitlement on the north side. That’s probably most of the reason for the difference. This is mine, and I will fight to hold it rather than take turns or work together so that the whole street is clear for everyone.
Wait…that’s it…(I started thinking about some of the western neighborhoods where police and firefighters live)…it’s not a neighborhood thing, it’s pretty much a white thing.
And I’ve just proved the mystery of Trump being elected.
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We did this in my home town (Pottsville, PA), too, but without the creativity. An old beach chair usually sufficed.
Yes. This dibs thing was easily the thing I hated the most about living in Chicago. It’s not legal but it is accepted by law enforcement. A few neighbors can clear out half a block in no time and then everyone benefits.
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It’s how I met the vast majority of my neighbors, too. If they saw me and didn’t send out a child to help*, then they’d come out and say thanks and generally have a nice chat.
*Here in B’more I’m the one white guy in my neighborhood, and last year a neighbor sent out her three nephews (15, 16, 17) to help me shovel, all three are young African American men. We’re shoveling snow, talking here and there, and then the youngest turns to me and asks with complete sincerity, “Do all white people have maids?” Once I/we were done laughing about that, the same young man asked me if all white people belong to country clubs as well. It was, for me, one of the best days of the year.
In the opposite direction from my three amigos there’s a neighbor who bought a snowblower right after our own Snowpocalypse, so I’m curious to see how he uses it this year.
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Hi.
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So, nice until you’re proven to be an asshole, then very much not nice?
Way OT, but Clinton took all of Chicago except McHenry and Kendall Counties, and still lost. This is the first time the winning candidate did not win Chicago.
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This is also how I met my neighbors in Indiana.
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smiles…
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In certain ways, yes, you are right!
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It’s also really inefficient because it prevents the spaces from being used even when the “dibs owners” aren’t using them.
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You should have just saved your spot. What if your neighbor had a condition that wasn’t so visible? Hell, what condition prevented you from shoveling a new spot once your wife was inside?
I suspect you weren’t the only one thrilled about you moving.
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I dug out two spots, one for me, one for the wife. Someone else took them. I shrugged and went looking for some other spots. I did not go pounding on doors and bitching about it, I made do with a spot much further away, and made sure she had a spot as near to the front door as possible. I find that entirely fair. I did my part to clear some parking areas and felt entirely entitled to take other spots on what was aa public street. If folks don’t like it, they can blame the city for failing to do a good job cleaning up. Remember, I’d just moved down from Maine, they never had this problem up there. No one marked spots, and the city did a great job cleaning up the parking spaces within a few days.
Yeah… I don’t have any problem with my decision at all. I have a bigger problem with slamming people’s doors because your pissed about your chairs being moved when they were blocking a parking spot someone could be using.
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I spent the first 27 years of my life in Minneapolis. This never happens there – it would be considered a complete jerk-ass move… The streets get plowed promptly and everyone’s happy.
Very rarely some elderly person would put up a sign saying “please don’t park in front of my house, I need it.” That’s a different matter.
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I think that’s the big difference. Around here, residential streets are very narrow, so when it snows, you’re only allowed to park on one side of the street. The plows clear one side to make enough room for cars to drive, but the other side gets heaped high with plowed snow & ice atop the cars. So parking spots are not only extremely rare and coveted, but have to be dug out twice a day or so. If you’ve been tending your ten feet of cleared curb for the day, and someone steals it who doesn’t live anywhere around there, it’s infuriating. Thus: saved spots.
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My neighborhood will be interesting this winter. A couple local spots have become attractive to people outside the neighborhood and it’s already causing parking problems. Shit is going to escalate.
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I can counter the assertion that this happens is ‘every’ northeastern city. No one in the city of Buffalo ever claims parking dibs.
