You can’t park in this parking lot!

Today, the Friday after christmas I was in a pretty good mood. I need to take the furnace apart and look for a bad electric connection, but other than that everything else is working fine. Plus we have cold weather sleeping bags if it should become necessary to live on our body heat. Lynn had a visit with his surgeon and the surgeon’s nurse this morning to have his dressing looked at and changed — Lynn’s left leg is mostly scar and skin grafts with poor circulation so the wound healing is taking a little longer than usual but that was expected. The wound looks fine, and he’s got a new bandage and elastic wrap plus a “your body seems to reject foreign matter aggressively” comment from the good surgeon. Told you so. But it’s nice to hear that there isn’t any infection process at work from the professional.
Our next stop was to pick up the mail and yippee we now have Medicaid cards. Yeah great another step closer to death. But putting that aside, I decided to swing by the Goodwill store on John E. Devine Drive to see if we could use our SNAP cash benefits to purchase some clothes. We can’t and that doesn’t make sense but something did happen that’s worth my bitching about.
I dropped Lynn off at the door since falling down on the slush will be bad for his healing process and I carefully chose a parking spot for our home and transportation. Now I don’t do this lightly. When I park our home I pick a spot that is out of the way of the regular customers and is something that I can drive out of when we are ready to leave. Parallel parking a 32′ RV with trailer is a new skill to me and I’m getting better but it did take me three tries before I had everything where I wanted it. Then the trouble began. A Goodwill worker came up to me as I was ready to walk into the store and said “You can’t park here.” Three times. “You can park in that big lot over there (pointing).” Now this is a statement I interpret as “You can’t park on my property but you can park on someone elses.” And “I don’t give a shit because it’s your problem not mine.” Well I keep my boyish good looks by making my problems someone elses as much as possible, my problem being that Lynn was already in the store and I wasn’t going to leave the RV alone. So I politely asked the man to go into the store and tell Mr. Shackelford that he can’t shop here and he’ll have to leave. “Who’s he.” The owner of this fine rig. “Well I don’t know him.” Not my problem. My problem is that I’m not going to leave a guy with a walking handicap, recovering from surgery alone here and I’m not going to leave his home alone and risk it being towed either. By the way Manchester, NH has regulations allowing towing companies to steal you property, pay them to release your property and then try to prove that your vehicle was taken illegally. Good luck with that.
Anyway our repartee continued until Goodwill guy realized that we were there to shop, not squat and he changed his tune to “I have tractor trailers coming and going all day, this is a busy place and you’re in the way.” Yeah not so much so as I’d already taken that possibility into account when I chose the parking space.
Well at the end of all this Goodwill guy had me move over into the main parking lot and tie up 7 or 8 parking spaces.
Not only does no good deed go unpunished but I really didn’t expect the Goodwill staff to give me a knee jerk “You can’t park here.”

About Art

55 years old. By training, ability and experience I am a master toolmaker. My most recent projects include designing and building a process to grind a G rotor pump shaft with four diameters and holding all four diameters within plus or minus 4 microns of nominal. This was an automated process using two centerless grinders refitted to my specifications using automatic load and unload machines plus automatic feedback gauging. I also designed and built an inspection machine to check for the presence and size of a straight knurl on a hinge pin using a vision system for non-contact gauging.
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