Parking as close as possible to where you work sounds like a good idea, but what if you park at a private business? Would you expect the business owners to be okay with cars parked in the parking lot that have no business being there?

In today’s story, hospital workers start parking in an engine shop’s parking lot, but the engine shop’s owner knows just how to get them to leave.

Let’s see what he does…

Hospital expansion causes parking problems.

Back in the 90s I worked at the family engine shop downtown.

It was an L shaped building, with a “back lot” that was separated from the street by a brick wall topped with a wrought iron fence, the only access to it was through the shop.

On the other side of the building we had a 20 spot lot that was completely open.

The shop was about 3 small blocks from the local hospital.

The hospital made it harder for the employees to get to work.

The hospital decided to remodel and expand, but since they were landlocked at the time, the only place they had to build was their parking garage and lots.

So they immediately changed their policy to only emergency room parking on site, they bought or rented several lots around the city and ran a bus (maybe busses) to get everyone to and from the hospital.

From what I gathered, the staff lot was the furthest away and the bus stopped at every lot on its route adding quite some time to the staffs commute.

They started towing cars.

They got very strict that there was no staff parking for any reason in any lot other than the staff lot, this included visiting doctors or specialists, whatever.

It wasn’t long before our parking lot started filling as we were the closest business with an open lot.

At first we simply had any car with a hospital sticker towed.

The people parking in the lot started pretending to be potential customers.

About two weeks after that we would start getting keys in the drop box with notes like “makes funny noise when turning right, have ready by 2pm”.

We would take the car around the block for a “test drive” and write some notes if we noticed anything.

Of course they never wanted to fix whatever that issue was if we actually found something.

The uncle had a bright idea.

My uncle quickly got tired of these shenanigans and had a glorious solution, use the back lot to store these new “customer” vehicles.

He would have me move the cars into the back, behind the customer and shop vehicles right next to the fence so the “customer” could clearly see their vehicle(s).

He then charged for a days storage and for every car we had to move to get the hospital staffs car in and out.

I don’t know exactly what he charged, but probably around $100 total for the day.

Parking in the lost cost more than just money.

Not only that, but it would take me 40 minutes to an hour to “move everything around” just to get to one of these vehicles out.

Of course the hospital staff would yell and complain over the price and how long it took me to get their vehicles.

My uncle would just smile and if they didn’t want to pay tell me to move slower “take extra care of this important customers car” he’d say while he set up the paperwork to place a mechanics lein on the vehicle.

It didn’t take long for the issue to reduce from a full lot to maybe one when we got to the shop in the morning.

They certainly scared the hospital staff away!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

If the price is right, the parking lot could be worth renting out.

This is a funny parking story…

Some employees were probably exempt from the new staff parking lot.

One person rented his parking spots to teachers.

This reader has a parking suggestion for the hospital.

Inconvenient parking is the worst!

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