Last night, me and my girlfriend went to one of my friends’ mom. She was having some problems with ads from GAIN and she couldn’t load her filters in Paint Shop Pro 9, basically some small issues I had to help out with. We were supposed to leave at 8 pm, about the same time the football stadium a bit further down the street was filling up with people for yet another death struggle of Lierse, the soccer heroes who’re about to fall out of this country’s crappy premier league.
Lierse is ‘the’ example of how you can pretend to be big and actually be a loser all the time. I think this year they won about one time in thirteen matches. Bad management, players who’re in fear of not getting paid, scandals… you name it, it’s all there. Typically for a team that’s still riding the waves of a long forgotten championship almost ten years ago (1997), they still think they’re the best, and ‘by Jove’ they even act like it too. Everything has to take a step aside to make way for King Football. Everything, except Coolz0r and his girlfriend. I’ll tell you what happened last night.
As I’ve mentioned, I needed to help out this cool ‘elder’ lady. Despite her age, she’s really good with computers and tries to stay up to date. She follows courses of Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and a lot of other stuff. But sometimes she needs a hand, and then I go and help her out.
The house I live in is laying in the back, compared to our neighbors. We have a sandy (in this case muddy) road leading to it that goes all the way from our house to the street and this road runs behind the gardens of our fellow street inhabitants. It’s a rather long trail, but we like it. Some other people have started to use it too, building a small garage in the back of their garden to access it. It’s something like an overgrown toolshed with room for a car. In general, 5 or 6 people are using this ’service road’, which is not an official street and not a public parking lot. Yet still, every damn night this overrated football team plays at home, fans feel themselves comfortably enough to go park there because it’s close to the stadium, often blocking us from accessing our own premises.
The police doesn’t do anything about it. They never have. When it’s football night, everything is allowed in this neighborhood. In every street around the stadium, local residents have no more rights. Fans park on the sidewalk, every free inch is taken. Complaints of the locals… ignored. ‘It’s only temporary’ is a standard answer. Also ‘if we have to start doing that (towing cars) we’ll be busy all night’. Other excuses may vary, but you get the point. My dad almost dialed himself a malfunction complaining about it, but he just gave up on it years ago, as did the rest of the neighborhood. So yeah, basically, the fans of this lousy team have the right to park anywhere. Including on the property of local citizens.
I saw it happen again tonight, because as I drove off the yard, already some 8 cars were parked on our driveway, forcing me to go off-road to be able to pass and to get on my way to help out my friend’s mom. Damn I was pissed already. But hey, you’re on your way to pick up your girl and have a quiet drive to a nearby city, things like that shouldn’t get in your way then.
So I picked up my loved one, drove off to fix a computer and have a nice chat. No harm done.
I actually left Lier, where I live, at 8.20 pm. Fixing the pc was easy, setting up a forward for Gmail, deleting some adware crap and presetting the filters in Paint Shop didn’t took so long, so after some smalltalks we were on our way back, arriving in Lier again at 9.50 pm.
We felt like some fries, because we still had to eat and very coincidentally, the best fryery is only 40 meters from the place where our muddy road intersects with the main street. I drove up our driveway and parked the car in the first turn, as I saw a lot of cars were still parked there. The game wasn’t finished yet. I blocked the exit to the street by parking in a way nobody could leave, knowing I’d only be gone for ten minutes, because there were no customers in the fryery as we passed by it, instants before. Me and girlfriend walked to the fryery (we call it ‘frituur’ but I don’t know any English word for it) and ordered what we wanted to eat. We’ve been served very quick and headed back to the car, and ow joy some guy was hitting his horn already. [:-)]
As we approached our car, he got out of his and started shouting immediately “who the hell we thought we were and what the fuck we were doing there goddammit”. Great. I always love these guys. They go park some place where then can sense with their elbows it’s not allowed and then start making fuzz like they own the place. I told him: “Dude, I live here, and I’m going home and you’re in my way” to which he suggested I should back up in reverse to the street so he could leave. Of course I wasn’t planning on doing that. I put my fries in the back seat, started the car and turned on my headlights. The guy was getting red as I patiently waited for him to take his damn Saab (license plate KHW 419, if I recall it correctly) and drive it off the road into the bushes so I could continue my quest and have dinner at home.
Meanwhile, two ladies passed me by, apparently related to the monkey in the Saab. One of them turned back, so I opened my door, got out and told her ‘Excuse me, I live here, I’d like to pass’. She looked very understanding and they both got into the car. The monkey behind the wheel was going bananas and an arguement started to spin off in the car. The monkey wanted to escape, but the ladies tried to stop him. I already saw it coming, so I locked my doors and indeed, the man broke free and ran to my side of the car trying to open my door. He noticed I locked it, so he bounced a few times on my window, calling me a pretentious brat, telling me to back up. And I so wasn’t doing that. He was out of control, and having no control over me only made him more angry. So he got back in his car and after a few minutes of the slowest game of chicken ever played, (under pressure of the sane women, no doubt) drove off the road. That’s how I was able to get back to my own house, over my own driveway.
The sad part is, it’s like this every time. I can tell you stories about guys in SUV’s who even drove over my mom’s flowers to park their car. Okay, it’s dark so they couldn’t have seen it, but that’s no excuse. They shouldn’t be there in the first place. Plus, my dad hung some plastic chains (the red and white ones) to clearly mark it’s private property and we noticed in the beginning people just ignored them, stepping out of their car to un-click the chain, drive passed it and then pull it up again. Really. How gutsy. Then after a while the chains were gone. Driven into pieces and spread along the way. No sir, don’t you try to stop us from parking here. We love the Lierse, and thus we have the right to park as close to the stadium as possible. And if that happens to be in your yard or on your driveway, then ’screw you’.
I think I’ll be going for fries again on the next ‘home-match’. I love ‘em best with some ketchup and shredded onions. Yeah. It’s good to park close to the frying tent, then I can have really hot fries. Maybe I’ll be eating them right there, so I’ll let the car be parked ’til 10.30pm. I’ll write down the license plates of the brave trespassers first. Lord knows what evil monkeys can do to a harmless and abandoned car that’s in their way.