Source: Reddit
So my little sister (who is the sweetest girl in the world) is 12 years old but can’t walk or communicate. Her mental age is around 6 months.
She obviously can not attend a regular school, but since we live in a big city, there is a wonderful school for kids like her. Even though we don’t own a car, since we don’t need one, we got the city to put up signs in front of our house designating a 4 meter spot for wheelchair pickup and drop-off for her school bus every morning and afternoon.
The signs went up perhaps two years ago and after the first week we never really had any issues since most of our neighbours are wonderful and totally understanding of our designated spot.
For some context, we live in a perhaps poorer community, though we’re well off (but in our nine years here, we’ve had nothing but great interactions with everyone here). Sadly, the neighborhood is gentrifying and we’re getting more self centered people with their Mercedes Benz or Audi’s honking while my sister gets loaded onto her school bus (which takes around four minutes, but blocks our little street) which really pisses us off, as well as the other sane people that witness it.
Naively, we thought this would be the extent of our unpleasant interactions. In September, we woke up like on any other Monday morning to find a shiny BMW parked in our disabled spot. It wasn’t just partially in it, it was positioned perfectly to take up the entire spot. To make things worse, there were about a dozen open spots on the block, and it’s not like they were all vacated that morning since we wake up at 6:00 AM.
We were baffled. I’d seen this car many times since last July, and it was definitely the same car, since there aren’t many burgundy sports cars in our neighborhood. It was usually parked about twenty meters South on our street, so we knew it belonged to a neighbour a few doors down.
We did all the basics in this type of situation, we took a picture, took down the licence plate and called the police to report it. The cops came by within the hour and wrote a big fat ticket, I believe it was for $700, but don’t quote me on it, anyways, it was a significant amount.
At around noon, a smug angry guy came knocking on my door (I had the day off from school and was home on my own). It was obvious that it was the owner of the car, so I made a quick decision to record the conversation (or screaming match) on my phone.
I opened the door and before I could say a thing, the douche lays into me (I’m a 16 year old guy and he’s in his mid forties, mid life crisis maybe). He accuses me of all things ranging from putting up those signs this morning to frame him to being racist (he was East Asian I believe, but we have a really diverse community). He goes on to say that disabled spots shouldn’t even be a thing, that it’s always empty (totally shooting himself in the foot based on his previous comments), that we should pay for his undeserved ticket, that it isn’t even an inconvenience since the spot next to his was free and my sister could just get on the bus from there, blablabla.
Once he finished, I said okay, and shut the door on his furious face. He rang the doorbell another five times before storming off. To my satisfaction, the recording caught everything fairly clearly. In the evening I told my parents what had happened and gave my dad a copy of the recording.
We have a pretty tight-knit community (for the most part) and there is a neighbourhood Facebook group with around 3000 members. My dad decided to post a summary of what had happened along with the recording and a picture of the car in our spot on the page. There was immediate uproar with people saying they would fight back or whatever, we were humbled by the feeling that our community was standing up for us, but we didn’t think anything would come of it.
The next day, I leave the house to go to school and walk by the guy’s car (back in his normal spot) and notice that the front right tire was deflated. Upon closer inspection, it was slashed. As I said, our community is tight-knit, but I can’t say I expected anything like this to happen.
The guy must have seen the Facebook post, because he didn’t come back to our house to complain or accuse us of anything.
The following weeks were sweet. Whenever I saw him in public, people would go up to him and remind him that he was a shitty human being (a bit harsh in my opinion, but they weren’t my words).
In November, his house had a for sale sign in the window. The house market had also gone done by a bit. I’m always kind of curious about how much houses similar to ours are selling for compared to how much we paid for ours in 2011, so I knew what he paid for it in July. Once I saw the for sale sign, I rushed home and checked the local house listings, and low and behold, he was selling for $90 000 less than what it was going for in July. He really wanted to get out of our neighborhood!
While his crime wasn’t nearly worth $90 000, I must say that I don’t feel bad. Worst case scenario, he sells that obnoxious car of his, which would easily cover the lost money.
Let’s just say that we haven’t had a single car parked in my sister’s spot since.
