Finally, a place to tell this story!

[mariamousie1]

This is my favourite stupid driver story. This happened when I was in high school.

The high school parking lot was all fenced in except for the entrance, which is wide enough for one car. The idea is you drive in, park or drop off somebody and circle around to drive out again. In the morning there is always a long line of cars driving in, dropping off, circling and leaving.

One such morning my mom drove us to school and we were behind a car that paused right in the entrance to let his kid out. This in itself was idiotic because he was holding the whole "circling" procedure up. My mom was going on about what an idiot he was when his kid left the car and then he started to BACK UP. To this day I don't know what he was thinking. There were about 3 cars directly behind him and a whole line of cars waiting to turn into the entrance, and he thought he could somehow back out and leave?

My mom honked at him in vain, and he backed into us. My mom got out and asked to see his insurance and drivers license and the guy didn't have them on him. Bad move. My mom took down his license plate number and told the people at the reporting center (or wherever she went, I can't remember) and they were quite interested to hear he was apparently driving without a license! I think I'm going to illustrate this a little just to make this clearer.

-------------------[X]------------------
--------------------Y
--------------------Z
--------------------123456789

X is the guy that backed up, in the entrance.
Y is us in the little laneway.
Z and the numbers are the people behind us. It was a crappy parking lot system, but who backs up with all these people behind them? At least look for crying out loud! I love this story still. Even better than the woman who said she rear ended us because her car was too long (my mom's favourite). Anyway, sorry if this sounds kind of vague, it happened a long time ago. Edit: the Y, Z and numbers kept floating to the left, so ignore the dashes to their left, it's just to keep them in place.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Edit: the Y, Z and numbers kept floating to the left, so ignore the dashes to their left, it's just to keep them in place.

When I need placeholders, I use dots and make them white so you can't see them.

My high school has a semi-circular drive in front, or you can pull in the far side of the student lot, go through the teachers lot, and pull up on the side of the school (this is how the buses get in and out). This route meets up with the exit from the semi-circle to make a double lane to get back to the street, and both options are one-way only.

[wolfie]

Bit off-topic, but the dots and dashes are assuming a monospace font. There's a better way - the "code" tags. Each of the boxes below has a line of 5 asterisks, 3 lines each consisting of an asterisk, 3 spaces, and another asterisk, then a line of 5 asterisks.

Without "code" tags (like the bold/italic/underline/whatever tags, except with the word "code" - for obvious reasons I can't show what the actual tag looks like):
*****
* *
* *
* *
*****

With "code" tags:

*****
*   *
*   *
*   *
*****

They were designed for inserting snippets of computer source code into a message (frequently uses spaces for indenting to show loops and stuff), but can be used anywhere you want to force things to line up.

[mariamousie1]

Thank you guys!