If nothing else, your ad should at least be funny.

So cheers to whoever wrote this little gem and got away with it.

Via Adrants. Here’s the permalink.

On Saturday night, I finally parallel parked properly, tucking Rodney expertly between two cars, albeit after some wriggling. Thus, it was with much anguish and a certain sense of injustice that I plucked the summons from between the wipers two hours later. So the car wasn’t actually parked in a parking lot. So it took up one lane on a two-lane, two-way road. So there was a no parking sign somewhere. Whatever happened to the appreciation of good motoring? How could the warden have failed to notice how dead centre Rodney was between the front and back cars? Or how he was precisely 8.1 inches from the curb? Or how the front wheels were shrewdly turned outwards to allow for an easier exit?

Little things count for a lot. And had the warden taken the time to just stand back and consider the artistic merit on display, I’m sure he/she would’ve had second thoughts. That’s what we need, Singapore. We need to learn to look at things for what they should be, not for what they are. We need to be able to look at the fat bird statue along the Singapore River and say, “this is an extremely creative impression of the result of too much birdseed” and not something like “Wah, bui jiao”. By extension, our traffic wardens need to see illegal parking not as illegal parking but as the culmination of the complex neural processes that make possible the hand-eye-mouth coordination needed to look between three mirrors while turning a plastic wheel furiously and yelling for everyone to shut the hell up at the same time.

Er… and that’s it.

Parallel Parking Shame

Whoever invented parallel parking lots ought to be shot. Not because it’s a bad idea. But because I’m utterly hopeless at it. Over the weekend, due to circumstances that I cannot now remember, I was forced to park parallel-y. After seven minutes of the most furious wheel spinning and heavens cursing imaginable, I’d only managed to get the left side of Rodney into the lot. Which is where I left him.

I remarked to Nessa that in the time I’d taken to half park, some people could’ve had some sex. This led her to assume that I am an expert at quickies which I promptly denied only to have her jump to the conclusion that that must mean I am an expert in superquickies which I denied again only to have her hop on to the idea that the word “premature” can somehow be applied to me. Her brain is apparently a triple jump champion.

But no matter. I’ve done some research and parallel parking can be done in five simple steps which I will list here.

1. Stop parallel to the car in the lot in front and no more than one metre away from it.

2. Back up and turn the wheel full left when the back edge of the front car appears at the corner of your back window.

3. Look into your right wing mirror. Once both headlights of the car behind you appear in it, straighten the wheel.

4. Keep moving back till the back edge of the front car passes the corner of your front windscreen then turn the wheel full right. You should be in the lot by now.

5. Wriggle till comfy.