Mental Monday #2

[ciroccoj]

The guy who works at my parking lot is back again. This makes me inordinately happy. I have no idea what his name is, or anything about him, and his English is spotty at best (he's Somalian), but he'd become a regular part of my day in the last two years. Every morning that I went into school, he'd be there, cheerfully helping people find parking spaces as the lot filled up, and if you were willing to leave him your keys he'd even double park you once the lot was full.

And then near the end of last spring, he was replaced by a parking ticket machine. Drop your coins in and go. And that made me sad.

But now I'm back, and there he is! Wooot! Maybe the parking lot owners realized that what they saved on his salary was lost by the fact that they now had about 20 cars less on the lot every day.

Funny, the people who become part of your world without you knowing anything about them. I remember when I was at Queen's, there were these two very elderly Chinese ladies who lived in or near the ghetto. I knew absolutely nothing about them except that they were about Daniel's height and looked older than the moon and wandered about together wearing these pajama-like blue suits. And then somewhere in the late 90's, they both died in a housefire. And everybody at Queen's was shocked and saddened, even though I doubt anybody who didn't live next door to them ever spoke a word to them.

Well. Must prepare for my second (also, my last) class of the week :)

Comments

Parking lot attendants

[animaltalker.livejournal.com]

I'm very lucky, I have a reserved parking space inside a gated lot at school because my grant program has an office in the St francis Center (we have the oddest campus- three STATE colleges share it with an active Catholic Parish and we occupy another old Catholic church for class space and an old synagogue for an art gallery). Anyway every morning I have to wait for the gate to be lifted, some of the students (they are nearly all work study students) know me, some have been in my classes or even my grant program, so they recognize my car and me, they smile and let me in. But now there's a new guy on some days ad he can mess up my whole day. He moves very slowly in everything he does (he may have a mobility issue so I try to cut him some slack) and he can turn a simple request for a loading pass by the motorist in front of me into an ordeal and then after he's finished that job and logged it in, he stares at my monthly pass like he's no freaking idea what it is, in the meantime my window for getting to class on time is getting smaller and smaller. Ugh, I cringe every time I see him, doesn't help that he looks slightly like the GEICO cave man. Oh well, so much better than the days when I was waiting in line with all my stdents trying to find a place to park in the big lots or parking structures.