A tale of two cities.
San Francisco is very different than Boston in a myriad of ways, but no one event so clearly illustrates this fact than the reaction of passers-by when one's physical person is blocking the only available parking space on a street.
So Saturday morning found unsound and me, waiting for our Door-To-Door containers to show up. Unlike Boston, when you get a permit in San Francisco to put a storage container on the street, the nice DPW people do not in fact show up to hang signs on the street telling people not to park there. Instead, the DPW people approve a permit to be attached to the containers themselves as they leave the warehouse; where you put the containers when they show up on the flatbed truck is your responsibility entirely.
We didn't know this until Friday, when I, in my naïveté, called Door-To-Door Storage to say that I did not yet see a permit blocking off a street parking space for our containers that were due to arrive the next morning. Stephen, our friendly Door-To-Door representative, made no apologies for failing to pass along this information and instead suggested that we park our car in a space close to our front door and then move the car the next morning. This would have been a great idea, had we a car.
Instead, we hatched a vigilante plan. We had borrowed some camping chairs from tiny_chicken and mittenstone to use as living room furniture while we were waiting for the rest of our things; we would go out early Saturday morning with those camping chairs and spend the three-hour window of time from 8:00 am to 11:00 am sitting in an available parking space waiting for the containers to arrive. We had seen, in our week here in the apartment, that parking on our street was not a challenge and that there were frequently several spaces available simultaneously.
This plan would have worked out fabulously had it not been a Saturday. On Saturday mornings at 7:15 am, no one is leaving for work and vacating parking spaces. No one is awake. No one is moving their car. There were no spaces available.
While we waited on the sidewalk, hopefully, our prayers were answered and our neighbor vacated a space immediately next to our building. Hallelujah! We hurried like vultures to the carrion and set up our chairs in the middle of the space, coffees in one hand and phones in the other. No other parking spaces were vacated the entire time we sat there. To say we were lucky is an understatement on the same scale as saying that the Red Sox are making me a little sad lately.
Having spent the last 13 years in Boston developing a healthy respect for the epic difficulty involved in finding a parking place, I feared the worst kinds of vitriol would be rained down upon us by passers-by who wanted that space. I feared that we would be laughed at, questioned belligerently, perhaps even threatened. I was afraid someone would just park there anyway, bodily harm to us be damned.
Instead, people smiled. They told us that they "liked our style." They thought it was "a great idea to get a little sun if we couldn't get to the beach." They welcomed us to the neighborhood. Not a single person had so much as a dirty look for us. I swear I am not making this up.
Our things arrived mostly unscathed at almost exactly 11:00 am, everything's moved in, and we're unpacking now. The place is shaping up, with a real bed and couches and other important furnishings in place. We're going IKEA-ing later, I think, for bookshelves and a TV stand. There are incredibly good fresh plums from the local farmer's market on the counter. We saw Dorothy Allison read last night at a bar in the Mission called the Make-Out Room, for at an event that benefitted the Center for Sex and Culture. I start work tomorrow. Life is pretty damned good.
So Saturday morning found unsound and me, waiting for our Door-To-Door containers to show up. Unlike Boston, when you get a permit in San Francisco to put a storage container on the street, the nice DPW people do not in fact show up to hang signs on the street telling people not to park there. Instead, the DPW people approve a permit to be attached to the containers themselves as they leave the warehouse; where you put the containers when they show up on the flatbed truck is your responsibility entirely.
We didn't know this until Friday, when I, in my naïveté, called Door-To-Door Storage to say that I did not yet see a permit blocking off a street parking space for our containers that were due to arrive the next morning. Stephen, our friendly Door-To-Door representative, made no apologies for failing to pass along this information and instead suggested that we park our car in a space close to our front door and then move the car the next morning. This would have been a great idea, had we a car.
Instead, we hatched a vigilante plan. We had borrowed some camping chairs from tiny_chicken and mittenstone to use as living room furniture while we were waiting for the rest of our things; we would go out early Saturday morning with those camping chairs and spend the three-hour window of time from 8:00 am to 11:00 am sitting in an available parking space waiting for the containers to arrive. We had seen, in our week here in the apartment, that parking on our street was not a challenge and that there were frequently several spaces available simultaneously.
This plan would have worked out fabulously had it not been a Saturday. On Saturday mornings at 7:15 am, no one is leaving for work and vacating parking spaces. No one is awake. No one is moving their car. There were no spaces available.
While we waited on the sidewalk, hopefully, our prayers were answered and our neighbor vacated a space immediately next to our building. Hallelujah! We hurried like vultures to the carrion and set up our chairs in the middle of the space, coffees in one hand and phones in the other. No other parking spaces were vacated the entire time we sat there. To say we were lucky is an understatement on the same scale as saying that the Red Sox are making me a little sad lately.
Having spent the last 13 years in Boston developing a healthy respect for the epic difficulty involved in finding a parking place, I feared the worst kinds of vitriol would be rained down upon us by passers-by who wanted that space. I feared that we would be laughed at, questioned belligerently, perhaps even threatened. I was afraid someone would just park there anyway, bodily harm to us be damned.
Instead, people smiled. They told us that they "liked our style." They thought it was "a great idea to get a little sun if we couldn't get to the beach." They welcomed us to the neighborhood. Not a single person had so much as a dirty look for us. I swear I am not making this up.
Our things arrived mostly unscathed at almost exactly 11:00 am, everything's moved in, and we're unpacking now. The place is shaping up, with a real bed and couches and other important furnishings in place. We're going IKEA-ing later, I think, for bookshelves and a TV stand. There are incredibly good fresh plums from the local farmer's market on the counter. We saw Dorothy Allison read last night at a bar in the Mission called the Make-Out Room, for at an event that benefitted the Center for Sex and Culture. I start work tomorrow. Life is pretty damned good.