Common Courtesy

The other day I had to make a late night run to Blockbuster to fulfill one of my homework assignments. Seeing as I don’t have a license yet (and yes, I am sixteen) I went downstairs to the basement to ask my dad for a ride. He was very good-natured about it, and we jumped in the car to go the 7 blocks down to Blockbuster. I spent around ten minutes rummaging through random movies that were supposed to have good acting in them and came away with three. My homework assignment was to find one movie with “good acting”. Do you know how hard it is to watch movies for your homework? It’s tough. Worse than writing any paper. So the fact that I found three movies clearly shows that I’m a dedicated student. And a happy one at that, considering my dad just paid for three movies that I could now watch on the weekend. So, upon arriving home we were both in a good mood. That is until my dad pulled up in front of our house. There in front of our house, in my dad’s unmarked parking space, was another car. Another car in MY dad’s unmarked parking space. I know, the horror, right? “Now, why, just tell me why that car had to park in my parking space in front of my house. We were gone for a total of 15 minutes!” my dad instantly yelled. A few curse words followed with an explanation as to why a person would be so stupid as to park in front of our house. Who knew that someone could be so frustrated over a taken parking space? Especially when there were five other open parking spaces! I live in the city, on a busy street, with houses that have been converted to apartments aligning the street across from us. When there are no parking spaces in front of the apartments, instead of going down to the next block to park their cars, the people housing the apartments just park on the other side of the street where there are no cars. Weird, isn’t it? Apparently to my dad it is. “Now, why couldn’t they have gone down and parked in front of Tye’s house. No one parks there, he’s 87 years old, and doesn’t have kids!” My dad went on. As if his kids, meaning me and my 8-year-old brother, were a good excuse as to why we should be able to park right in front of our house. Its not as if my brother and I really cared about whether we parked right in front of our house or one car space down. Please. No one is that spoiled, regardless if they go to CA or not. And, it isn’t as if Tye’s house has a big sign on it that says, “I’m 87! Park here!” My dad argues that it is just courtesy. Which brings up the question, what is courtesy? Opening doors and smiling at people when you make eye contact is what comes to mind when I think of courtesy. Parking your crappy car because you work all the time and make no money on another street so that the family that has kids that go to CA and drive nice cars across the street from you can have their own two parking spaces in the middle of the city, is not. I do understand that you might not want to park in front of someone’s house all the time, however, when there are no other parking spaces what are you supposed to do? When there are no parking spaces in front of our house we park across the street. I’m pretty sure the people who live in the apartments don’t start cursing when they see that someone has parked in front of their apartment. Courtesy is different for everyone and I’m not trying to make my dad look like a bad person at all, it’s just that what he thinks is common courtesy might not be what other people think common courtesy is. People are so diverse and I think its important to have a set of guidelines that everyone sees in the same light, so that everyone gets along more or less. So far these guideline have been called “common courtesy”. And while I think it is very important for everyone to have courtesy, lets keep it at common courtesy so that everyone can relate to what common courtesy means. Because I’m pretty sure that “parking at Tye’s house” isn’t a common courtesy in everyone’s book.