You know how annoying it is when someone tries to use your parking spot? Imagine having a business with a private parking lot for customers only but other people try to leave their cars there.

That’s what happened at this guy’s business when a nearby hospital moved their parking lots so far from the hospital that the hospital staff seemed desperate to find somewhere closer to park.

Check out what happened.

Hospital expansion causes parking problems.

Back in the 90s I worked at the family engine shop downtown.

It was an L shaped building, with a “back lot” that was separated from the street by a brick wall topped with a wrought iron fence, the only access to it was through the shop.

Things were always a little tight…

On the other side of the building we had a 20 spot lot that was completely open.

The shop was about 3 small blocks from the local hospital.

The hospital decided to remodel and expand, but since they were landlocked at the time, the only place they had to build was their parking garage and lots.

This is where it got worse!

So they immediately changed their policy to only emergency room parking on site, they bought or rented several lots around the city and ran a bus (maybe busses) to get everyone to and from the hospital.

From what I gathered, the staff lot was the furthest away and the bus stopped at every lot on its route adding quite some time to the staffs commute.

They got very strict that there was no staff parking for any reason in any lot other than the staff lot, this included visiting doctors or specialists, whatever.

It wasn’t long before our parking lot started filling as we were the closest business with an open lot.

UH OH!

At first we simply had any car with a hospital sticker towed.

About two weeks after that we would start getting keys in the drop box with notes like “makes funny noise when turning right, have ready by 2pm”.

We would take the car around the block for a “test drive” and write some notes if we noticed anything. Of course they never wanted to fix whatever that issue was if we actually found something.

My uncle quickly got tired of these shenanigans and had a glorious solution, use the back lot to store these new “customer” vehicles.

They had to deal with this issue!

He would have me move the cars into the back, behind the customer and shop vehicles right next to the fence so the “customer” could clearly see their vehicle(s).

He then charged for a days storage and for every car we had to move to get the hospital staffs car in and out.

I don’t know exactly what he charged, but probably around $100 total for the day.

Not only that, but it would take me 40 minutes to an hour to “move everything around” just to get to one of these vehicles out.

It worked out really well1

Of course the hospital staff would yell and complain over the price and how long it took me to get their vehicles.

My uncle would just smile and if they didn’t want to pay tell me to move slower “take extra care of this important customers car” he’d say while he set up the paperwork to place a mechanics lein on the vehicle.

It didn’t take long for the issue to reduce from a full lot to maybe one when we got to the shop in the morning.

GEEZ! That sounds like a lot of work!

The hospital’s parking situation sounds horrible, but they had a great solution to prevent people from using their lot.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user has a great idea of utilizing the lot for making money.

This user thinks this was a missed opportunity.

This user shares how things were back in the 80s.

This user knows how people found their ease in this situation!

This user shares about their employee who had to deal with something similar.

Their idea worked pretty quickly!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.