When you live in a city, parking is serious.

So what happens when your neighbor decides to disrespect the unwritten rules of street parking?

In this situation, a Chicago resident found a way to serve some petty revenge to disrespectful neighbors taking up parking where they shouldn’t.

Let’s get the full story…

Did you really booty-trap a parking spot?

I’m going to try my hand at this. I hope you liked my Goonies reference in the title.

So I live in Chicago, and parking is horrible.

My street happens to be one of the few in my neighborhood with free parking, and so I have to deal with people ‘claiming’ their spot all the time (by putting a chair or traffic cone in it), despite most of them living blocks away.

But this isn’t about them.

Our new downstairs neighbors started renovating in November (they haven’t moved in yet), and they’ve been absolutely disrespectful and discourteous to us the whole time.

They hired a questionable contractor, who leaves our shared front door open, turns off our electricity and gas randomly, and leaves the garbage from their renovation strewn around the sidewalk outside the building.

It gets worse…

Plus, they work from 8am to noon on Saturdays directly below my room, which I give a little leeway for but why not noon to 4pm?!?

At first we tried to give our new neighbors a heads up, that this kind of stuff was going on, but rather than address the issues they denied it and denied it, and even claimed we were photoshopping when we provided pics for proof.

Cue emails to other HOA members about how we were slandering them… but we had photo proof.

Back to parking. One day I’m coming home from work and notice a nice big (parallel) parking spot right in front of my building… great!

As I pull up, I notice something on the ground in the spot.

It is the old plywood floorboard, clearly from our new neighbors’ floor, with hundreds of nails still in it, all facing up.

The contractors were serious about claiming the spot so they could park their giant van there in the morning.

This wasn’t okay…

I don’t believe in claiming a parking spot at all let alone overnight (it is technically illegal, too). So I move it onto the grass next to the spot and park.

I go upstairs and regale my petty heroism to my roommates, and find that they had been considering calling the police (because a 4’x8′ with nails in it is really too far).

But one, just five minutes before, had said to the other, “Don’t worry, someone like predditr will come along and be like, ‘**** that.'”

You better believe it, sister.

The next morning, I exit the building to go to work, and see that the huge van intended for the spot I took is haphazardly parked a few spaces behind me, with the front end in the spot, and the rear taking up a whole lane of the street. The hazard lights were on.

I get home at the end of the day and park without incident. The van is gone.

Things got even wilder…

My roommate who had been home the whole day enthusiastically informed me of the events of the day.

The van sat there with the hazards on until the battery died just after noon.

Not long after, a police officer showed up (because a van had been blocking the road for 6 hours…) and wrote them a ticket and told them to move it. But the battery was dead.

Apparently they couldn’t get a jump in a reasonable time or something (roommate isn’t a lip reader), because they ended up getting towed.

Best part? The new neighbors are probably never going to move in, because we’ve been so much trouble.

Let’s see what Reddit had to say about this…

This commenter knows the rules of spot saving.

Another user thinks they did the right thing!

And this person had an even pettier idea to keep the revenge going.

Good luck to anyone who tries to mess with this guy!

You don’t mess with people’s parking in the city.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.