Discretion is the Better Part of Valor

We were 15 minutes late for our one-hour meeting this morning due to having to go back home to get some forgotten items.  After having been there for a few minutes, I was shown a note by the meeting secretary written by the kitchen counter-person asking me to move my car from the handicapped parking spot by the wheelchair accessible door.  I declined to move my car for unknown reasons to some other location in a almost empty parking lot.

The woman working at the counter was a regular staff person, but did not work mornings in my experience.  Apparently she was haranguing others smoking outside the meeting hall about how she was going to call a tow truck to have my car moved.  Lea came in from outside expressing her perception of the woman in terms of “what a f******g b***h”.  The woman’s son turned on in Lea in the meeting forcing the meeting secretary to have to ask him to sit down and be quiet.

The topic was on resentments.  After the next person got done sharing, I shared that it was clear my car was causing a resentment and I was getting one from the drama being created by the woman over how a guy in a wheelchair parked his car in a handicapped parking spot.  By the time I got out to my car, the woman had left a note under my wipers in the middle of my windshield where I could not reach it.

The woman came out, introduced herself and tried to explain why there was a problem with how I was parked—even though it was the same way I parked 5 days a week for the last 14 months.   I remained cordial and polite explaining why I don’t park in the gravel parking lot, how my car was parked in a way that was least likely to block through traffic while allowing me to stay on the concrete surface to and from the meeting room.

Unable to comprehend her reasons for making such an issue of my parking caused me to have concerns for her rationality and I did not want to engage in her drama resulting in my getting a time-out from the Alano club of which I am a dues paying member, we left.

I have mildly obsessed on this issue over the last 15 hours.  At this point my plan is to contact the Alano club manager, the local District 34 Accessibility committee chair (my friend Toni) and the District 34 DCM who is also on the board of the Alano club.  Getting the woman fired might be overkill.  Risk analysis tells me that my being able to attend meetings without hassle by staff is far more important to me than her job.  I also need to learn what is an appropriate response. First I will talk with Toni tomorrow and go from there.

I am grateful that I did not escalate a weird situation into a bad situation and had the discretion to not participate in a drama that only had degrees of losing.