Not This Time

 A prompt from The Scintilla Project:  Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Write about a time when you taught someone a lesson you didn’t want to teach.

She had always wanted to be one of those people who could stand up for herself when others were taking advantage but somehow, she rarely was.  Perhaps it was because she was one of those "polite Canadians".  Or maybe because she, like most people, preferred to avoid conflict rather than face it head on.  Sometimes, it was just because the person who needed to be taught the lesson was absent from the scene at the time.

When she came out of the office, after crossing the parking lot fighting the bitter cold blustering winds and blowing snow of the impending blizzard, she was surprised and dismayed to find a large black pickup truck parked directly in front of her car with less than a millimetre of space to spare. Whaaaatttt???

She wished she could be the person to craft this creative diagram:

as posted on Q107's Facebook page

She wished she could be the one to write a clever note like this:

also as posted on Q107's Facebook page

She wanted to ask the driver if he'd recently been to a monster truck jam and was trying out some of the moves.  If he'd found his driver's license in a cereal box.  Or if he was trying to compensate for something by driving such a big truck.  But he was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, she was the one that quietly took the photos on her cell phone (once again wishing she had upgraded to the latest iPhone in order to get a better image) and then gently reversed her car, hoping not to hear the telltale scrape that meant the huge pickup truck had in fact been parked on top of her car's bumper(which, phew!, she didn't) and just drove away.

Of course, when she got home, she posted the photo online for others to deride and ridicule.  And the next day, she sent the photos to the property manager for the building, along with the offender's license plate, just in case anyone else had been a victim of this person's inappropriate parking manoeuvres.  Maybe she wasn't cut out to be cruel and would rather be kind, maybe she wouldn't be the one to teach this fool a lesson but still, there were things that could be done to bring about a modicum of satisfaction.  That would be enough, this time.