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A white car getting towed, representing the entitled Karen's car.
Photo is a representation of story scenes.
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An ambiently lit gas station at night
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What do you think of this? Was the Karen in the wrong for parking there? Or simply for her attitude.
On my experience…
Back at my university job, employees had to park somewhere where they were out of the way and wouldn't inconvenience customers. Naturally. Can't have the service staff mingling with the bourgeoisie.
The problem was parking was atrocious on even the quietest of weekdays. Packed with idly wealthy persons of status or age where shopping in high-end stores on a weekday was a worthwhile use of time.
So, at a certain point, a rule was put in place that “out of the way” meant “the very top of the parking building."
For openers, who were there before the mall even opened, this worked alright. There were no dawdling customers pulling in and out of parking spaces, or blocking the corkscrew to the top to slow you down during your long ascent up 7 stories to the top of the parking structure. So you could sort of just race through the unskippable bottom floors where you had to drive through the empty parking aisles, hard turn the steering wheel hard to the left, and gas it up the spiral to the top. Taking the soonest available spots that would soon fill up with customers' vehicles otherwise.
However, if you had a shift that started in the late morning or a closing shift starting in the afternoon, you'd be forced to drive to the very tippy top of the parking structure. And now, there was no racing through the lower levels and gliding up the parking structure coil. It was, instead, tedious minutes waiting for people to pull in and out of spots on the lower levels. With cars of anxious drivers waited to snipe parking spaces of shoppers returning to their vehicles.
It took 10-15 minutes to get to the top of that building sometimes, and another 5 to get back down the elevator. And that's a safe estimate.
And those 20 minutes were time a college student just simply did not have, especially for a minimum wage job. So we'd often try to sneak our cars into corners of the limited parking spaces outside the cafe, showing up with jackets over uniforms as we snuck to work like Solid Snake on a stealth mission. But this had it's draw backs too. You'd wind up spending your whole shift peering out the windows, making sure that one of the suspicious parking guards who loved catching employees out wasn't scoping out your vehicle and doing that math-lady meme in their head of how often they saw it parked there. And they were determined too. Determined to pass out parking notices and fines to employees as often as possible, or smugly raise an issue of it with the store manager.
A better strategy was parking in the soonest available spot in the parking garage. This had it's draw backs too, but it was far less readily noticeable to security guards, who avoided going into the parking building if they didn't have to.
But, either way, once they caught on, you were toast. Now they knew what your vehicle looked like, and they wouldn't soon forget. It didn't help that our old Toyotas and Fords stood out like a sore thumb amongst all the brand new BMWs and Mercedes that otherwise filled the lot. So it was hard not to miss them.
From that point on, you'd be immediately doomed to getting to work 25 minutes early just so you had time to drive up to the top of that dang building.
What's the point of all this? I guess it's that I totally understand why this minimum-wage-earning gas station employee didn't have an extra care to give about parking further away from work than she had to when her employer clearly wouldn't allow her to park on site. But she totally went about it the wrong way by making it someone else's problem and just generally being a pain about it.
Also, when you're going to skirt the rules habitually, you have to be prepared to face the consequences, if not now, then eventually. And that's definitely what happened here.
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