Imagine seeing a driver park in such a way that they’re blocking the road and making it difficult for other people to cross the road. Would you mind your own business or confront the driver to try to get them to move their vehicle?

In this story, one parent is in this situation when he’s taking his child to football practice at a busy and crowded sports club. At first, he understands why the driver decides to park there, but he thinks it’s only temporary. When the driver continues to park illegally, he decides to confront him.

That doesn’t go well at all, but he drops it until he hears the driver yelling at a coach at the sports club. At that point, he’s determined to make things right, but at the same time, he’s wondering if he’s overreacting and too old fashioned.

Let’s read the whole story to see exactly what happened.

AIO? Politely asked coach driver why he was parked illegally and dangerously, he got angry with me, I reported him

On a Saturday morning, I take my child to football practice.

It’s a VERY busy sports club as it has a gymnastics club, a football club, a rugby club and a hockey club and often they all play on a Saturday morning.

Parking is chaos but I’m used to it and arrive early so that we don’t have to stress.

This would be kind of annoying.

This week we arrived and there was a coach completely blocking the road as it dropped off a football team.

Annoying but understandable as there’s not really any way to do it any other way.

Me and my son went inside to drop him off with his team and then I went out again to make a phone call.

The same coach pulls up outside the gymnasium building, on double yellows which are also “backed up” by cones. The driver jumps out, looking annoyed, and storms off towards some buildings on the other side.

He saw how big this problem was.

At the same time I see a woman with a very young child struggling to see to cross the road as a result of where the coach is parked.

I call over to the driver and say “you do realise it’s illegal to park there?”.

He immediately starts being very very confrontational and telling me to “stay in my lane” (a pet hate of mine, it’s an excuse to tell people not to say things that need to be said) and “what has it got to do with you” and “I’m trying to find somewhere to park”.

The argument continued.

I responded by saying that if he was finding somewhere to park he shouldn’t have parked in order to do that.

He asked me what it had to do with me.

I said that it was a safety issue and that he could literally see people struggling to cross the road.

He hated this, and escalated his nonsense so I left it and went away, around the corner and finished my call.

He overheard someone else calling out the driver for the same issue.

A while later, whilst going from the football pitch to the toilet (which is by the gymnasium), I heard an angry exchange and popped my head round the corner and saw same driver, standing next to his coach which he had now turned round but parked in the same place, after having moved the cones!

One of the gym coaches, a girl I know, was telling him the same as I had and he was INCREDIBLY rude to her. She’s about 18 and whilst she’s feisty and can look after herself I genuinely don’t think it’s appropriate for a man in his 30s/40s to be shouting at a young girl like that.

I waited for it to calm down, went inside the gym and spoke to her, and she was very, very angry. She said he’d just point blank refused to even listen to her and said that he was “parked on the lines” as if the lines allowed, rather than prevented parking.

He decided to make a call.

I went outside and was eyeballed by the driver which I dealt with by waving at him in an incredibly camp manner.

I then rang the coach company and complained about him.

The manager there seemed sympathetic and said he’d get it sorted. He hadn’t gone when I left with my son 10 minutes later but of course he could have gone soon after.

AIO to this? Is this just normal these days? Do people genuinely think that we should all stay in our lanes and not get involved in anything? I hear it so often these days that I’m beginning to think my standards and values are old-fashioned and maybe a bit silly?

I don’t think he’s overreacting at all. The other driver is acting rude and entitled. Just because he refuses to follow the rules and doesn’t care about the safety of others doesn’t make it right.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an apartment tenant who is being called petty for blocking her parking space with trash cans.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is a good question.

This person guesses at the bus driver’s perspective.

This is funny!

Another person thinks he overreacted.

It is a good question if there was bus parking somewhere. Initially, it sounded like that’s what the driver was trying to figure out. In the end, maybe he was told to park where he was parked because there wasn’t anywhere else, or he did the best he could under the circumstances. Or, maybe he was jerk.

It is what is is, but blocking the road is not okay. Safety for people crossing the road is important. Either the driver was being a jerk, or this sports club needs to mark their bus parking better.

I’m having flashbacks to when my kids would play soccer, and I’d have to look for parking for a normal size car on a crowded Saturday. Even though there was a fairly big parking lot, it was sometimes really hard to find parking. I can’t imagine trying to find parking for a bus.