Is it your community's custom to save shoveled parking spots?

I must admit, I have woosed out. It got down to 42 here last night and I found it very cold. When a day in summer hits 90 it's too hot. The climate here is too damned nice all the time.

Generally in England, it doesn't snow enough to need to shovel out anything, Scotland end up getting out the spades.

I haven't even seen snow in something like 7 years.

Cycloptichorn

Chicago dibs

Nice to see we have some company in attitudes. After reading this I thought of a great joke. Go and remove some of the lawn chairs and other crap - don't park there just remove the crap. Then some unsuspecting sap sees an empty clean space with no personal items to claim it and thinks damn I'm lucky today. He parks there and later comes out to find his car trashed.

Being from Boston (where slashed tires, bashed windows and worse are not uncommon), this made me laugh.

This lawn chair thing pissed me off during the winter I was in Chicago, and there was a "big" snow that year (18" or so in one storm, which, to my surprise, crippled the city for weeks). At the time, I thought it was just silly stupidity, and I hope no windshields ever got bashed in over the lawn chairs I'd put back on the sidewalk while walking home from happy hour.

Looking back, I'm inclined to see it as emblematic of Chicago's (and maybe Boston's, dunno) inherent laziness and sense of personal entitlement: I did some work here, and I expect eternal credit for that work, and I don't intend to ever do any work again. I'm not really flippant about that -- I worked with some astonishingly lazy people in Chicago, and a lot of them would bust your balls if you did any more than the bare minimum required. That trait was about the only thing that seemed to cross all ethnic, gender, and class lines in Chi-town.

Here in Wisconsin, I'm happy to say, we dig our car out and get on our way. I've yet to see anyone try and save their spot after leaving it -- that's something FIBs do.

(Anyway, in Madison it's customary that any furniture put out in the street is up for grabs, year-round.)

whatevah

Good point- here in Berkeley, leaving things on the road or the street is a sign that they are free for the taking.

Cycloptichorn

Convenient, but wrong. Wouldn't you say the sweeping cultural comparison is a a bit of a stretch considering that, in Wisconsin, there's actually ******* parking? That's a concrete variable I think ought to be applied. There's no parking here, dude. Whereas Wisconsin (yes, including that bustling metropolis called Madison) is one giant parking space. So that's why Chicagoans get angry. Even in the summer you typically have to park a five to ten minute walk from your apartment.

The "sense of entitlement" you observed is actually a "sense of getting fucked in the ass by Mayor Daley" via street parking stickers, exhorbitant meter rates, street cleaning every goddamn week, and many other methods by which he nickels and dimes drivers, taking money that, in my experience, contrary to yours, is hard earned.

Dude, I was living there, I dealt with all of that as well. And I'm not making the sweeping "entitlement" generalization as a result of the parking, but as a result of my sum experience of working there -- though I do connect it to the broader civic culture perpetuated by the shameless grifters who govern the city. I was on multiple occasions and in multiple places of employment ridiculed and once physically threatened for actually doing the work I was paid to do.

Maybe things have changed in 12 years, and/or maybe the agency who sent me out gave me a skewed view of Chicago employment, but everywhere I went work was done slowly (though generally competently) and with grudging bemusement.

As for Daley -- well, ****, can't you people vote for a different mob for a while?

(hee hee hee, poke the FIB. as a native Californian, I've taken the poking from most of the country my entire life.)

The shameless grifters ought not to be confused with people holding honest jobs, as the former make there money of the latter. They are mutually exclusive. Insofar as laziness goes, I suppose my perspective from the financial district is a little distorted. Nobody seems to stop working. People talk into their blueteeth on the shitter and take their coffee intervenously. But then again, maybe my bias is related to the north side, since no one I know really fits the description of your former colleagues, and we all live within the same ten-mile radius.

Obviously, Chicago did not make a great impression on you while you were there and that's unfortunate. Perhaps you've got to be from a certain place to recognize and appreciate it's quirks? But not always. I moved from the north to the south some years ago and have always appreciated Southern hospitality and it's special charms. It took a few cocktail-less Sundays to accept that I couldn't buy booze on the Holy Day and getting used to people smiling and greeting you without wanting something from you was a new experience but I was open to it all from day one and happily embraced most of the characteristics of my new surroundings. It's called adapting.

I've known many people who were/are hard workers in Chicago. I was one of them myself for many years. So was my mother and my brothers, the rest of my family and many, many people I came in contact with on a daily basis. But one thing I've found in common north, south and everywhere else I've lived and worked. Lazy, trifling-ass employees are everywhere. Chicago, California, NY, Atlanta. Everywhere.

I lived northside, sort of -- Ukrainian Village when it was still filled with bitter grannies and evenings were punctuated by gunshots on from the far side of Western -- but everywhere I worked for any length of time was attached to the city/mob apparatus -- construction corporations that built parking garages in city and big prairie business parks for now-discredited corporations like WorldCom, Chi Public Schools building, **** like that. Upper management were always invisible except for occasional sweeps of the premises with entourage in tow, middle management were all grandchildren of northern or eastern European immigrants and tended to reveal themselves as casual bigots over time, bottom rung were all Southside black folk with the odd white freak or young married Mexican thrown in. I saw the pattern repeated in enough places that I took it to be the norm for the city, and I generally saw these places from the bottom up, with seamy underbelly exposed.

All that said, it was 1998, the city was just coming to grips with widespread gentrification, the Northside project tenants had been kicked out but the buildings hadn't been knocked down and were full of squatters. Roaming gangs with baseball bats patrolled the area between Cabrini Green and the Rush St. bars where young white pricks chomped nauseously on expensive cigars. Chicago was the nation's murder capital that year with a round 600 homicides, there were rumored to be not one but two serial killers working the neighborhoods around UIC, bands of feral dogs were roaming the no-man's land between Little Italy and the United Center. The city utterly failed to clear snow from Southside streets for six weeks following the New Year's Day blizzard, trains were breaking down or running off the track and Metra had 3 fatal accidents, there were shoving matches just to get on the jam-packed buses on Chicago Ave...

It is possible that this was an unfortunate time to form an impression of Chicago.

That said -- I found the parking-spot-claiming lawn furniture bizarre and in keeping with the other negative impressions I was forming of the city ------- but I admit that I may not have fully appreciated its utility, as I took CTA to work (or walked the 20 blocks to the loop, which was faster for the first few weeks after the blizzard) and most of the people in my neighborhood appeared to be retired or unemployed.

Also, I like to talk some **** from time to time.

Okay, totally. I'm protected from a lot of that **** in the private sector. But CPS, any other enterprise funded by the city? Ouch. My buddy is an attorney for the city and has about 364 furlough days this year. I think last Thursday was the only day he was allowed to work in 2010.

CPS was the worst place, actually. That's where I was forced to take a seat on the loading dock from time to time, where we'd all smoke and watch the snow blow around in the alley for hours. Amazing how many able-bodied men working for who knows how many contractors it takes to distribute mail and restock copiers in a building.

The construction company was more about everybody looking busy while not actually being busy -- typical cubicle behavior, but without any attempt at subterfuge, and with no increase in pace if the workload picked up. Had some interesting interactions with some very dodgy General Parking and WorldCom folks, though. Educational.

The oracles have spoken: on this Saturday's edition of "Car Talk," Tom and Ray fielded a call from Chris in Chicago, who had been arguing with her husband "over who's the rightful owner of a recently shoveled parking space." Here's the summary:


(Now remember, the important thing to note here is that Chris drives a 1987 Volvo). The caller claimed that she saw this sort of thing all the time in Chicago, and the brothers, from the Boston area, confirmed that the practice was also common in their neck of the woods.

QED

It snowed here last week.

People started wandering out of their houses, uneasily blinking up at the sky. Occassionally crying out when "something cold" got in their eye. We started gathering together in little groups of 4 and 5, seeking reassurance from each other. Some of the more foolish children started running about, but were quickly gathered up by their parents, or concerned neighbor.

Finally, Larry, who runs a lawn mowing service, said "I know what it is! It's that stuff from the bible! Manna! That's what it is!"

Larry scooped some up and commenced to chewing on it. He said "Bleech! This doesn't taste like honey wafers. It tastes like it's got road tar in it. See, there's black specks and dirt all mixed in."

Eventually, we lost interest and went back inside, leaving our lawn chairs in the road.

Oh my god...

thats GREAT!!!