You can tell a lot of things about a person by their car, or at least narrow down some options to likely outcomes.
If you see a really flash sports car you can assume, the person is rich or in lots of debt and quite possibly a man in a mid-life crisis.
You don’t stick around to see if it’s true but that’s who you pictured, and you move on.
A large 7-seater car however will leave you considering that this is a young family, particularly if the windows seem to have attracted lots of finger marks and smudged smiley faces drawn on.
Cars with large boot space and a cage styled between the boot and the top of the backseats would belong to a dog owner (or at least you hope so).
On top of the car itself you can find out about the owner based on some of the contents, a pink fluffy dice hanging from the mirror doesn’t say older business man and seats covered in clutter give you a very busy person.
Where the car is also gives some clues – outside a school could be a teacher or a parent, on a driveway means they’re at home and maybe their house is a new clue, or if they’re parked outside a hospital, they could be sick or a carer or they may just be a visitor.
Doctors and nurses have their own car parks so that is a bit of a giveaway.
Why have I suddenly started talking to you as if I am the Poirot of automobile investigation?
Well, my car can tell you a lot about me, its not particularly flash, I don’t have a fluffy dice and it can be found outside the school, on my drive or in the hospital.
My car is tall, it has a blue badge on the dash board and a blue tax shaped sticker on the front windscreen with a disabled sign.
It has another sticker on the back windscreen saying leave space for wheelchair and a big door at the back to roll a wheel chair in and out on the ramp.
Its usually parked in a space with yellow hatched markings next to other cars that are very similar.
From my car it’s likely that’s somebody could tell that we’re a young family, that a member of the family is disabled and unable to drive as they roll in at the back.
It would tell you that we need space around us and patience as we’ve got to do a lot more than just step out of the car.
We’ve got a lot of equipment to get out and buckles to undo before we can get everyone out and go anywhere.
It would take a shorter time to see and figure all this out than it has for you to read this paragraph.
The extra space afforded to the disabled spaces in my local hospital (Morriston, Swansea, Wales) has either side have been taken upon by able bodied people without a blue badge to park in which means rather than the disabled car users having MORE space between them as intended by design, they actually have LESS space than every other row of cars.
How helpful, unfortunately these people never get fined or stopped so it’s likely to continue. This tells me a few things about the people parked in the middle:
1. They have never struggled with disability for themselves or a loved one (Unfortunately it sometimes takes this to open people’s eyes)
2. They are selfish people who don’t care about anybody else as long as they’re ok
3. They know they’ll get away with it
4. They care more about money than they do about people (If there was a fine implemented that space would never be full of cars)
As well as this the pavements on the way into the hospital are covered in cars which means unassisted wheel chair users have no chance of accessing THE HOSPITAL.
Just think of the insanity of a world where we were so self-involved that we don’t notice that we’d made it impossible for a disabled person to access a hospital without rolling themselves into the road.
I wish we lived in a world where fines weren’t needed to inspire people to behave decently but we don’t.
So next time people get out of their cars and leave them where they are, I would love if they took a second glance and thought, I wonder what my car says about me?