Parking Space Invaders

So this afternoon, I take Gracie to the park for her walk prior to picking up Thing 2 from school.


I pull in to the parking lot, which is pretty empty except for one truck.  Gracie and I head off to chase geese and squirrels attend to some bathroom habits.  And I don't mean both of us were chasing squirrels and geese and dropping a deuce.  Only I did.  


KIDDING!


After our walk, in which we were chased by geese (the geese at the park are badass and they scare me) and chased some squirrels and Gracie did her business in the middle of the road (she has this thing against doing a #2 on grass) we head back to the car.


The parking lot is still mostly empty except for a car that arrived while we were out on our walk.


And because there were 100 million empty parking spots, OF COURSE the car owner would park here:

You can even see that this is a mostly empty parking lot so why, WHY would this driver decide to park RIGHTNEXT to my car?  Why not one parking spot over, leaving an empty one between us?


I have parked at the side of the road inside the park and have been the only car parked at the side of the road and someone will come and park 3" from my back bumper.  For reals.  There's 1/2 mile of empty roadside in front of me but nope, they have to park on my bumper.


I'll go to a shopping center and deliberately park in the North 40 so that I wouldn't have to deal with a Parking Space Invader and yet they still find me.

Back when I still had my Ford Excursion (a really, really big SUV), I had gone somewhere and made sure to park far enough away to ensure that the dreaded Parking Space Invader wouldn't find me.  They did.  Two of them. One on either side of me and so close were they to my door that the only way I could get into my vehicle was by crawling in the back window.



I was discussing the behavior of the Parking Space Invader with someone and wondered why the PSI does this and the other person said they thought people do it as an unconscious "safety in numbers" thing.


That may be but I think the real reason people do it is because they're clueless assholes.