The other day I was doing a little outside work at the store. Off to the side a little ways, a truck was sitting in the fire lane beside the curb. I thought nothing of this, as many cars park there as customers run in and out real quick. This probably isn't the right way to go about your parking business, but I find it less annoying than the twenty two year old who thinks nothing of parking in the handicapped spot. I do notice, however, a stern looking dude standing beside the truck with his cell phone out taking pictures of the truck and, I'm assuming, it's license plate.
A woman approaches the man and is like "Um, excuse me sir, is there a problem?" He just looks at her with what I can only assume is a permanently engraved frown on his face and says "You're not supposed to park there." Then he briskly walks off. The woman kind of scratches her head, gets in her truck and moves it out into the parking lot while the man, I'm assuming, was going to send his pictures off to the authorities.
I was out there another half hour or so doing my thing as no less than three cars parked in that same spot with nary a sign of the Cell Phone Vigilante.
It got me thinking. I personally don't condone parking in spots that are forbidden or otherwise engaging in any activities that might be considered suspect that would, more importantly, separate me from what little money I have in my bank account. But tattletales kind of irk me. Like when I was in elementary school. The teacher would leave the class and some kid would
say something really dirty. Something that would just blow my sheltered mind through the outer atmosphere. But I would say nothing to the teacher; I would merely think "Holy *bleep*, he just said the H-E-Double Hockey stick word!" But there was that one girl. You know the one. The one who sits at the desk right in front of the teacher's desk. The one who reminds the teacher that we were supposed to have a quiz today. The one with her nose up in the air and the smug look plastered on her face. She tells the teacher. Yeah, nobody liked that girl.
When I'm trudging on along 635 and some idiot with a car that's not nearly as awesome as he thinks it is blows by me in the next lane doing 125 miles per hour, I may say to my wife "I wish there was a cop around here to show him what for!", but my first instinct is not to whip out my cell phone and speed dial the nearest Police Station to report that someone has the cojones to be speeding on the interstate. I'm just not that guy and it's hard for me to be in the mindset of that guy.
So yeah, unless something violent is happening to someone, I don't see it as my business to go around reporting on every little wrong thing I see someone doing. If the cops drive up and find you parked where you ought not to have been, well, you took the risk pal and it didn't quite pay off for you. That extra 20 steps you saved to run in and buy your 1.99 gallon of milk hardly seems worth it now that you have a 200 buckaroo fine staring you down. So good luck with that. Just know, I'm not the one who called the cops. It was the guy with the cell phone camera. Seriously, who died and made that guy Batman?
