Imagine working in a location where the parking lot isn’t big enough for all of the employees to park their cars there. Would you arrive early to make sure you get a good parking spot, wear comfortable walking shoes so you’re prepared to park further away, or find a reason to complain about the people who are parked in the parking lot?

In this story, several motorcycle riders trying to save room in the parking lot by parking their motorcycles two to a spot. But one disgruntled employee decided to complain.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Motorcycle Parking or: How They Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Bike

A story from a few years back, when I was stationed in Japan.

Parking on military bases usually isn’t that difficult to find. After all, they are built by Americans.

However, bases on mainland Japan are fairly compact, understandably so with the lack of real estate and whatnot.

Half the parking lot was unusable.

Construction projects are a near constant plague that often seem to take up a significant amount of parking spots.

At the time, there had been one ongoing in our dedicated parking lot for months, taking up nearly half the spaces.

30 minutes before work started, the parking lot would be completely full, and people would have to go park down the street, a few minutes walk away.

Of note, a large number of people in my unit had just started riding motorcycles in the months leading up to this incident.

People who rode motorcycles tried to take up as few spaces as possible.

Being (mostly) decent human beings, we would often park two bikes to a parking spot, so that we could save the limited spaces available for other people to use.

Of 20 or so available spaces, we might on average have about 8 to 12 bikes taking up 4 to 6 spaces. Efficient, right?

Well, understandably, people had been getting upset at the parking situation, and since there was nothing they could do about the construction, they would often try to find ways to “steal” parking spots.

The motorcycles in the lot were a fairly new thing, so they stood out. As such, people would direct their annoyance at not being able to find a spot at us, and as happens when you’re feeling particularly spiteful, they would find the pettiest of things to complain about.

There was a new rule aimed at the people riding motorcycles.

One day, somebody of some authority announced that, per base rules, you were only allowed to have one vehicle per spot.

This clearly seemed like a way to spite those of us riding, and that it did.

A lot of annoyed looks were traded, until one of the wiser individuals among us had an idea. Since it was “illegal” for us to park two to a spot, we would stop.

So we did. But it wasn’t that simple.

Complying would backfire for whoever complained.

Every day, most of the motorcycle riders would come in early, early enough that the lot would be near empty. We would park, one bike to a stall, and whereas we were originally compact and efficient, suddenly we were parking at an angle, taking up the entire spot.

Instead of 12 bikes to 6 spots, suddenly it was 12 bikes to 12 spots, and the parking lot would be full an hour before work even began.

Whoever complained about our breaking the rules suddenly found themselves parking even further down the street.

The rules changed back.

We continued this for about a week.

Monday came around, and we all just went back to our old ways, showing up at normal times and parking two to a spot.

Needless to say, never heard any complaints about the motorcyclists again.

Whoever complained certainly didn’t think through the consequences.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

It’s basic math.

Here’s how one company handled motorcycle parking…

This person thinks they handled the situation perfectly.

A motorcycle rider weighs in.

The new rule was a really bad idea!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.