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We all know what it’s like to live on or visit a cramped street, where there’s no parking in sight. Either there is literally no parking, or it’s a tight town or city alley which is already packed with vehicles, and no one’s showing any sign of moving any time soon. And whether you live on that street and want to park near your home, or you’re just visiting, we can all agree that inconveniences like this can be really annoying – especially when it’s raining.
Fortunately for the guy in this story, he lives in a condo with his own driveway and plenty of parking on the street too. Unfortunately for him though, he has a neighbour who doesn’t seem to stick to any kind of driveway etiquette.
Read on to find out what happened here.
AITA neighbour’s guest parked in my driveway
I live in a condo with a shared driveway, each unit has a single car garage and is allotted half the driveway (my unit is on the left, neighbor’s is on the right).
This afternoon I looked out my window and saw an unfamiliar car parked in my side of the driveway. When I went out it was unoccupied and I thought the neighbours might have a visitor who somehow didn’t understand how driveways worked.
Normally I would have shrugged it off and let it be, but my wife was on her way home and typically parks in the driveway, so I knocked on the neighbour’s door and sure enough, she was babysitting and the child was being picked up and then they’d be right out of the way.
Great, no worries – still super strange to just park in a stranger’s driveway when the entire street has available parking, including directly in front of the neighbour’s unit, but whatever.
But things didn’t go as planned from that point.
I went back inside and maybe ten to fifteen minutes later I glanced out and the car was still there! My wife was probably five minutes away at this point so I went back out and saw the neighbour hanging in the passenger side window just chatting away with the driver.
I was slightly less polite this time: I told her she needed to get out of my driveway or I would have her towed, at which point I heard the neighbour say something and all I could make out was the word “breathalyser.”
At this point I said “this is ******* ridiculous,” and the neighbour shot back, “your overreacting is ridiculous!”
I walked away back inside and saw her finally pull away, at which point I contacted my landlord to report the whole thing for documentation.
Yikes! Read on to find out how he was feeling about this down the line.
When my wife got home and I told her about the whole thing, she suggested perhaps the “breathalyser” comment meant that the driver literally couldn’t start her car due to one of those breathalyser things you have to blow into in order to start the vehicle, and the neighbour was blowing for her.
I obviously have no proof of that, but it does make sense of the otherwise strange and totally out of context mention of a breathalyser.
I am sitting here hours later still weirded out by the entire encounter, feeling like I was in the wrong for being mad about the situation, and also conflicted that if the driver was indeed under the influence I let her drive off with a child in the car and didn’t say anything.
AITA?
It is completely understandable that he would be frustrated that his driveway was being used without his permission – especially knowing that his wife and child would return home any moment.
And if it really is the case that the neighbour was blowing into the breathalyser for her friend, that’s both totally irresponsible and very illegal.
But if the woman had an accident with the child in the car? It would be very sad, but not his fault at all.
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Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.
This person agreed that he’d done nothing wrong.
While others thought out that whether or not she said ‘breathalyser,’ the neighbour was being extremely rude.
Meanwhile this Redditor explained the clear ettiquette when realising you are parked in someone else’s driveway.
It was ridiculously rude for the woman not to move her car straight away, let alone for her to linger while the neighbour chatted to her. It was clear that the guy needed his driveway to be clear again, and staying there without his permission is extremely entitled behaviour. After all, like he said, there was plenty of other parking available in the street.
If, in fact, the neighbour was blowing into the breathalyser for the woman, that’s truly concerning, especially with the child in the car. It would show a complete recklessness, not only for the child’s life, but for the lives of all the other folk on the roads. And something like that can never be condoned, under any circumstances. If, rather, the neighbour was muttering an insult that sounded like ‘breathalyser’? Well, that’s not kind either.
Don’t be like this neighbour. This is horrible behaviour.
