July 25, 2024 at 5:19 am

Her Neighbors Kept Blocking Her In Her Driveway, So She Came Up With Some Creative Ways To Stop Them

by Trisha Leigh

Parking is one of those things that everyone in America needs, so if you live somewhere it’s at a premium, things can go sideways fast.

And if your car was blocked in and the offenders laughed?

It could get hard to have a sense of humor.

This woman managed to keep hers and get the message through.

Check out the details!

Neighbors kept blocking me in, so I unleashed cheese, snow, and parking tickets on them

So two years ago in undergrad, I lived in an apartment off campus and rented one of three garage spots in the building.

Because of the layout of the driveway, a car parked anywhere in the driveway would prevent access in or out of all three spots.

For this reason, no one was allowed to park in the driveway, as was made clear by signage outside.

No one really took the rules seriously, which was annoying.

Of course, other people in my building and the building next door would quite often leave a car or two in the driveway, sometimes just for 10 minutes, sometimes overnight.

This became quite frustrating to those of us parking there, especially because we were paying so much for those spots.

The main culprits were the guys in the unit above me. The first time I really interacted with them, they laughed about how it was so funny that we would get so annoyed that they blocked us in.

Needless to say, this really irritated me, and I knew it would continue unless I took action.

So, she brought out the stinky cheese.

Yes, I did email the landlord about it first, and no, they did not respond. This drove me to pursue alternate methods of discouraging the driveway trespassers.

The first tactic was known as the cheese drop. As the name suggests, whenever I noticed a car parked in my driveway for an extended period of time, I would go out on my balcony next to the driveway and drop a slice of cheese down onto the car.

It was provolone and it was expired, so even better. After doing this several times, I eventually saw them discover the cheese, and they were amused by it.

I decided to escalate my antics.

Then, she tried freezing cold snow.

The three of us that parked there were responsible for shoveling the driveway when it snowed. The guys above us would always let their friends drive over the snow before we could shovel.

When we had a big snowstorm, we noticed they had let one of their friends park in our driveway.

We told them he needed to move, and his solution was to pull up off the driveway into the neighbors’ yard rather than leave (the neighbors’ wifi was literally named “DO NOT PARK IN OUR YARD”).

They left us his number, and I texted him and said he couldn’t stay there overnight. He told me that I could move the car myself if we wanted it moved.

So, when it snowed we barricaded his car with several feet of snow on all sides. We locked our shovels up, knowing they didn’t have their own. I watched from my apartment as they discovered their car fully blocked in (I warned them we put the snow there when we shovel).

They must’ve stood there with their hands on their heads for at least 10 seconds before one dug it out while the other stood around watching.

It was the fake parking tickets that finally worked, though.

The message was still ignored, so I took it a step further. I designed my own parking tickets and ticket envelopes and ordered them from one of those stationary websites.

Now, every time a car would park in my driveway, I would issue them a ticket.

For legal reasons, I could not actually fine them or impersonate any kind of authoritative entity, but I got great satisfaction knowing they would get that feeling of panic upon seeing an orange envelope on their windshield.

They may have even thought the landlord actually put them there, who knows.

Needless to say, a lot fewer people parked in my driveway after that.

Somewhat.

I bet Reddit is going to think she was too nice!

The top comment says they should have pulled out the big guns.