First World Problem of the Week: New York street parking wars

I was fortunate enough to be invited by some friends to join them at a restaurant on Long Island to watch some Ultimate Fighting Championship fights. There are better tributes one can pay to these great fighters than enjoying them beat each other bloody while stuffing yourself with chicken wings, but hey, we’ve got to start our own road to the octagon in our own way.

I went to where my beat-up pickup truck was parked on Willets Point Boulevard near Parsons Boulevard. I was shocked to see a sticker on the passenger’s side window.

VIOLATION

THIS VEHICLE IS PARKED ILLEGALLY AND IS HEREBY SUBJECT TO TOWING AND IMPOUNDMENT.

YOUR LICENSE NUMBER WAS RECORDED

New York City street parking regulations can be a Byzantine labyrinth of conflicting signs and notices, particularly in some of the more popular parts of Manhattan. Owning a car in New York City is a rare privilege and I am lucky I’m able to keep a car in the five boroughs, but it comes with a mountain of problems one must negotiate. Many of my fellow New Yorkers are horrible drivers. Parking in some parts of the city impossible and just about every non-millionaire who owns a car in New York has had their car damaged in some way without any justice or compensation.

In the more residential areas of Eastern Queens, the rules are normally much simpler. There are spots that are legal except for a window of time on a given weekday morning, when in theory a street sweeper will come and clean that section of street and curb. The Sanitation Department used to affix one of their infamous neon orange stickers on your car if you violate alternate side of the street parking.

In my neighborhood of Flushing bordering Whitestone, there are also some bus stops that may be legal on the weekends but then become illegal once weekday bus service resumes.

I was parked in a choice spot that was not in an alternate side spot. I’ve parked there repeatedly for years without incident. If any part of where I was parked was illegal, I would have received a parking ticket by now. This sticker was not a Sanitation Department sticker, not an NYPD sticker, nor any other kind of official sticker. Some asshole put it on themselves because they didn’t like that my truck was parked there.

I didn’t have time to peel it off, so I drove out to Long Island with the neon orange sticker screaming my alleged moral decrepitude to all the other drives of Long Island. I was the Uncle Buck of Flushing. I parked my truck in the parking lot of the bar/restaurant where I met my friends and hoped not too many people would notice the blazing orange sticker—the scarlet letter of parking scofflaws—besmirching the good name of all there at Hooter’s of Farmingdale to watch people pummel each other on pay-per-view.

That night, after watching Conor McGregor triumph without apology in his main event fight, I drove back home and found another parking spot on that same stretch of street. I didn’t want to tempt fate but no way will I let vandals determine where I park, and it’s convenient. Since it was near where the vandalism took place, it was convenient from the standpoint of reporting this matter to the law.

The next day I called my local police precinct and reported the crime. The officer on duty took my phone number and said officers would call when they were on the scene. A few hours later I got a call from the police and went to meet them where my truck was parked.

Three of New York’s finest were there to meet me. I showed them the sticker on the passenger window and noted that the truck had been parked completely legally on a public street only a few feet away from where it was not situated.

The police said they couldn’t report the vandalism as vandalism since there was no damage to my vehicle. I told them that this was indeed a crime, though not a serious one. That someone cannot just put stickers on someone’s property without their permission.

“It’s probably one of these property owners around here that don’t like you parking here,” said one of the cops.

I certainly didn’t expect them to assign their top detectives to this case or launch a task force to find the sticker vandal, but I at least expected them to report the crime, minor though it was.

Likely it was one of the homeowners that lives on that stretch of road. My neighborhood has quite a few very entitled homeowners who think they can claim portions of the public streets as their own parking domains. Some place traffic cones in front of their homes to claim parking spaces.   

Being a homeowner doesn’t entitle you to claim public land. If you want to live on a street you own, become a millionaire and live on one of the private streets in Forest Hills.

After the police left, I got two cups of boiling-hot water, some paper towels and a scraper. I held the paper towels over the sticker while slowly pouring each cup over them, letting the hot wet towels sit for several minutes over the sticker and partially melt the clue holding the sticker onto the window. After it was softened up, I scraped the sticker off without any trouble.

Whatever jackass put this sticker on my truck surely thought I’d panic and try to scratch the sticker off my window like some kind of berserker. No such luck. I won’t let my First World Problems get the better of me, I’ll let the snotty haters in my neighborhood bask in the glow of pride that I have in my beat-up pickup truck. 

Misplaced Guilt Problems

            Perusing the vastness of social media, a phrase has caught my eye a few times and has been repeated enough to call it a trend. The phrase is “Middle Class Problems.”

            Except that isn’t the real phrase. It’s a glossed-over sanitized version of a more apt, accurate and original term that caught on first.

            The expression is “First World Problems,” not “Middle Class Problems.” To be really hip, write it without spaces and with a hash tag (#) to replicate the preferred style of the Twitter social media site. #Firstworldproblems. “There is too much guacamole on my omelet,” is a good example of such a "problem."

I’m old enough to have gone to grammar school when the schools were still teaching students real subjects. Sure we had our share of lame love-in student assemblies from time to time, but there were some facts that they didn’t hide from us. One of those facts is that we, being Americans, lived in the First World. That meant that we lived in a country where widespread famine and disease were eradicated, political decisions were made nonviolently and the basic necessities of life were easily obtained by almost all of the population. Those countries that suffered from widespread poverty, famine and disease were Third World countries. Those were the countries we were thankful not to live. It was a testament to how lucky we were to live in the First World. We weren’t taught to be ashamed of that, but to be grateful for what we had, because there were many people in the world who did not have that.

            The Second World, we were told, consisted of countries like the Soviet Block, that were developed but still lacking in many things. Once the cold war ended we saw just how second-rate the Second World was, and while our government had lied to us about a lot of things, the horrors of Communism turned out to be every bit as bad as we were told.

            Nonetheless, there was no moral judgment or implied superiority in this division of the world. It seemed to make perfect sense and was instructive to us. There is nothing about “First World Problems” that ought to offend anyone unless you’ve actually been caught complaining about how the sound of your maid cleaning your house woke you up.  Living in the First World is a good thing. No one asks to be born where they were. There are millions of people who would love to live in the First World rather than where they’re living. Why would it be wrong to say so?

            There’s no reason to feel guilty about living in The First World or declaring it so. Developed Western Civilization gets to give the nomenclature to its own standard of living, and we have our shit together better than anywhere else; that’s fact. Trying to shame us into ignoring that or saying otherwise doesn’t bring indoor plumbing to the people of the Serengeti. It’s more misplaced guilt that has no place among a sane, self-confident people.

            And in fact, the phrase “First World Problems” is not a boast of wealth, racial superiority or some other politically incorrect geographic prejudice, but an acknowledgement of our society’s own fixation with the trivial. It at once exposes and parodies the shallowness and self-regard that comes with great material success and the corruption of societal excesses. It’s the snarky, electronic media equivalent of your mother reminding you not to be such a shallow jerk; there are starving kids in Africa, you ungrateful snot.   

            The refusal to use the term when that’s what you mean is the worst kind of moral cowardice. First of all, though they are surely related, economic class and the different spheres of the developing world are not the same thing. Being middle class in the U.S.A. is nothing at all like being middle class in Ethiopia. But living in the First World means living in the first world not matter what you’re class. In their effort to not offend, these phrase murderers are substituting a subset for a set, and it doesn’t follow.

In fact, using the phrase “Middle Class Problems” as a substitute puts the user in the worst of all categories: enjoying the benefits of living in the First World and most likely not doing anything of consequence to improve things for those people starving in other parts of the world, somehow needs to alert others to their superior sense of moral rectitude. Thanks for the implied moral lesson, now go send all your co-op groceries to Somalia. Don’t have the international postage coupon to send your artisanal cheese to Africa? First World Problems.