It's only ONE minute.

The parking on my street is heinous. During the day it’s always busy because I live right next to Kaiser hospital. Kaiser has its own parking garage (which is free on the weekends, btw), but a lot of people will drive up and down my block for that ever-elusive free two-hour parking spot. Or they’ll double-park next to a row of meters waiting for someone to leave — the meters are $2 for two hours, but you don’t have to move your car after two hours, you can just plunk more coins into the meter. Luckily after 6pm, meter and parking enforcement ends. Then it’s all Lord of the Flies up in there — cars are all over the place zig-zagging and u-turning just to get a good spot for the night. It’s car anarchy. It’s carnarchy .

This morning as I walked across the street to my car, I saw a car moving towards me, obviously waiting to see if I was going to leave. I got in my car and signaled to the waiting driver that I need one minute to warm up my car. I did this by holding up my index finger in the "one" sign. I got no reaction. The guy just stared at me. After about 30 seconds I saw the waiting car start to creep up alongside my car. When I looked over at the other driver, he had an annoyed look on his face as he stared at me with his mouth open and one hand in the air -- it was the universal sign for, "Are you leaving or what?"

Are you kidding me? Wasn't my signaling for "one minute" obvious? And it was 8-fucking-o'clock in the morning, who's NOT going to warm up their car at that time? I furrowed my brow and rolled down my window, then I held up one finger (not the finger I wanted to hold up, though), and said, "I NEED ONE MINUTE TO WARM UP MY CAR."

The guy's eyes bulged like he just realized what I was trying to signal to him earlier, he nodded and waved before backing his ass up to get out of my way and wait like he should have.