Annoying car man

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marty
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Annoying car man

Post by marty »

I admit this is going to sound weird but I would really like some opinions on something that’s driving me insane.

There is a guy who doesn’t live in my road but always has at least one vehicle parked in my road. He owns a quite nice, modern 4 x 4 and a very old camper van. Whilst I find this incredibly annoying (why not just park outside your own house?) I know there is nothing to legally stop him from parking wherever he likes. But what I am totally baffled by is that he will drive to my road in the morning in one vehicle, park it up, get into the other vehicle and drive off for the day. He’ll then come back in the evening, switch vehicles and disappear again. Sometimes the vehicles are gone for a few days, or even a week but they always come back. He was driving the camper van with no MOT for about 5 weeks so he is not someone afraid to break a few rules.

I am so tempted to take a day off and follow him.

Ladies & gentleman: your theories please!
Last edited by marty on Wed Sep 05, 2018 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by graham »

Hey Marty,

I have no idea what is going on here, but I was visiting my Mom back in the UK last week and encountered a similar phenomenon. There's a guy across the estate she lives on who owns a caravan, van, and smaller car. His small driveway can accommodate two of the three at any one time, and so he needs to park the third on the street. He seems to think he owns a small layby close to outside his own house and posts angry notes on cars that dare to park there, preventing him from using it as his own overflow. But his solution is not to park his own car close to his own house, but to drive to the other side of the estate and park in a place that prevents another resident from being able to get in and out of her own driveway.

I have nothing to offer, except for the observation that some people are just weird.
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J.R.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by J.R. »

As a person with a highly suspicious mind I'd say there is something rather iffy about this guy's behaviour.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by sejintenej »

J.R. wrote: Wed Sep 05, 2018 11:52 am As a person with a highly suspicious mind I'd say there is something rather iffy about this guy's behaviour.
Perhaps there are people (debt collectors, wife 0 whom he hopes will never find out about his 4 x 4 and think he is nearly bust.
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marty
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by marty »

Ok, so I'm definitely not alone in thinking this behaviour is at worst dodgy and at best weird!
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by scrub »

Could also just be a mental tic the guy has. I know a few people with ... erm ... interesting psychological quirks (to put it gently) and some behaviours make no sense whatsoever until you find out when they started. Maybe the guy used to live on your street and in his mind his car isn't safely parked unless it's on that particular street. The switching vehicles is so that something is always safely parked where it is supposed to be parked.

Of course, he could also be an inconsiderate ass for whom everyone elses convenience comes a distant second to his perceived natural rights.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by rockfreak »

Some years ago I lived in a block of flats where we were allocated one parking space each. One geezer appeared to be running a second hand car business of some sort and he and his mates' cars would often appear in our spaces, in various states of repair. This was in the days when you had to have a tax disc on your windscreen. Getting fed up with this I went round to inspect these cars whenever they appeared and discovered that many of them were out of date on tax. Some looked hardly roadworthy. So I took notes and then sent all the info (vehicle descriptions, plate numbers, etc) to the local DVLA. This was at a time when they were just beefing up the fines for vehicles that were either out of date or didn't even have SORNS. A few days later all hell broke loose as Del Boy and his dodgy mates rushed to remove their dodgy vehicles. I guessed that perhaps the DVLA had decided to pay our precinct a visit.
As to the threatening notes on car windscreens in the lay-by, well if the lay-by is part of the public highway you are presumably entitled to park on it. I would be along to the local police with the notes as evidence to ask whether this constituted threatening behaviour. As JR says, this sounds iffy. There's nothing like a large copper on people's doorsteps to bring them into line.
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Re: Annoying car man

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I think I'm going to have to follow him aren't I?
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by jhopgood »

marty wrote: Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:26 am I think I'm going to have to follow him aren't I?
Isn't that what you pay the men in blue for, if they think it is worth it?
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marty
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Re: Annoying car man

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Yep but I have zero evidence of any crime, just no reasonable (for me) explanation for his strange behaviour. Even if he has 2 families that don't know about one another that is not in itself a crime either, unless bigamy is involved.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by J.R. »

What is a policeman ? Very very rare in leafy Dorking.

There are so few of them now, Surrey Police are reluctant to even investigate housebreaking.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by michael scuffil »

I'd say the OP guy is either weird (and people can get very weird, especially in England, when it comes to car-parking), is trying to hide something from his wife, is trying to confuse the authorities, or is trying to avoid unofficial revenge-takers (gangland spat).

My neighbours (husband and wife) have four cars and a motor-bike. They have a double garage and a drive, but rarely use them for parking. (One of the cars, at least, has a summer-only registration, so that will have to go into the garage at the end of the month.) At least in Germany no one thinks they have an exclusive right to the space outside their house (but if you block a driveway, you're likely to find your car towed away quite quickly). Germans, incidentally, contrary to their reputation, are chaotic parkers.
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J.R.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by J.R. »

All very interesting, especially now as Doctors and DVLA say I really shouldn't drive, so I have handed in my licence and have no car.

Jan and I live on a fairly moden Housing Association estate built in the 1950's. Immediately opposite me is a family with two cars and a works van which is parked in the evenings directly outside my kitchen window. I accept they have that right, albeit there is a bus stop immediately outside my front door.

A couple of doors up on the opposite side from us, is a family of four, mother and father, their son and daughter who each have a car (A FOUR CAR FAMILY ??). When Jan and I moved to this estate some fourty years ago with our two young daughters, there was probably only one car per every other family parked outside houses.

I personally think that only one car per household should pay the prescribed road tax. Any second registered to the same address pay double the amount. Any the third, treble or quadruple. That might sort out the unnecesssary amount of cars on the road, mostly running their little cherubs to school just half a mile away.

Sorry folks, but I've just scrubbed up my soap-box and I.ve hardly started.
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by jhopgood »

Not exactly related, but when my son was using our house in Guildford, he paved over the front lawn so that I could park my car off road when we visited. (The council charges a fortune for visitor's tickets and you only get a book of 30 per year).
He works in Farnborough, got knocked off his motorbike, so uses a small car now. His wife has a C Max, which she uses to ferry their 4 kids around.
Now that they have moved, and I have managed to clear out enough space in the garage, I decided to see if my car would fit so that visitors could park on our drive. Additionally, I am fed up with the pigeon droppings on the car.
I got the car in by swinging in the wing mirrors and being very careful. However, I could hardly get out of the car.
The house is a 1990 build.
Have cars got that much wider since 1990 or was it never designed to be used by a car on a regular basis?
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Re: Annoying car man

Post by sejintenej »

rockfreak wrote: Wed Sep 05, 2018 9:07 pm
As to the threatening notes on car windscreens in the lay-by, well if the lay-by is part of the public highway you are presumably entitled to park on it. I would be along to the local police with the notes as evidence to ask whether this constituted threatening behaviour. As JR says, this sounds iffy. There's nothing like a large copper on people's doorsteps to bring them into line.
On TV yesterday; some bloke parked his car right across the access for a different person. The victim put a note on the windscree noting that his drive was blocked and suggested that the owner went for a coffee - a tenner was with the note!
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