This complaint absolutely required a diagram - I thought that making it would be a cathartic means of releasing my wrath.

Today, I had the horrible realisation that I had forgotten to pick up two things from Sainsbury's. We did our horrible Christmas shopping trip earlier to try to beat the crowds (and it was still horrendous) so I was annoyed with myself to realise that I'd have to go to the supermarket at the same time as everyone else.

As soon as I got there, I realised that the Roundabout of Annoyance had become instead a Roundabout of Death. The roundabout had practically become a car park. Unfortunately, I normally make the awkward manoeuvre of turning right directly after exiting the roundabout, in order to access the parts of the car park that nobody else goes into (no such luck today). This means that you can have cars completely ignoring you from three different directions, which decision is affected by five different junctions. Normally somebody is nice and realises you're trapped and lets you in, but there's something about Christmas that turns people into highly functioning zombies who have, sadly, remembered where their car keys are.

At Christmas, every part of the car park suddenly becomes a parking space. Grass becomes a parking space. Bushes become a parking space. Trolley bays become a parking space. Unfortunately, the middle of the road is also apparently a parking space (as illustrated on my diagram) or, possibly even more annoying, a place where it is apparently okay to hunker down and wait for someone to emerge from a REAL parking space. The person who did this was in a BMW, so maybe I should have expected it (sorry, BMW drivers - I'm only going by my experience). I honked at him, and he just looked at me and continued to wait, even though there was no way in hell I could get past.

I gave up eventually, and turned round to attempt to park somewhere else. I didn't have much hope for Homebase, which has a nearby supermarket carpark, particularly when I realised that every available square inch of road on the way to the Homebase carpark was covered in cars already. It was pretty difficult to get down there. I was expecting Homebase carpark to be full to capacity, if people were resorting to parking on the road leading to it (which you're really not supposed to do).

HOMEBASE CARPARK WAS EMPTY.
EMPTY.

So what people had done was park in really inconvenient places in areas that cars are really not supposed to stop, blocking the road for other users... all so that they could be, at most, one minute closer to Sainsbury's. Because Homebase carpark is really not that far away, and if you've decided to park on the road leading to it, you may as well drive for an extra few seconds and park in the actual fucking carpark.

I tried to report one of the twats who had parked in the middle of the road in the Sainsbury's car park (on the diagram!) and I was hoping the shop assistant would announce his numberplate over the tannoy, but she didn't.


Do big thumbs work? If it doesn't, the diagram is here: [link] BECAUSE I KNOW YOU'RE ALL REALLY INTERESTED