PARK

Women are more efficient at parking than men.

Who knew?

I did. College taught me.

Rewind twenty-five years. It is monsooning. I am inching through a packed parking ramp, dreading my dash to class. I spy the last open spot. It is tight. The cars to the left and the right have parked over the yellow lines delineating the spot; scaring off careful drivers, and wimpy parkers.

Late for class, I am not about to drive to another ramp. I am up for this early morning challenge.

Pull hard right. Rotate a smidgeon left. Straighten. Brake hard. Shift into reverse. Back up a bit. Straighten wheel. Shift into drive.

  

This is dumb. My standard transmission is whining more loudly than the storm.

Am I going to hit that car?

I glance to my right. That car -too close beside me - is big. Old. Green.

It belongs to my boyfriend.

 

I wedge my way into the spot, hoping not to hear the crunch of metal, thinking that every man I know - dad, brothers, uncles, boyfriend, friends - would pull into this spot without hesitation.

There would be no second guessing the width, space, dimensions. There would be no forward, reverse, and repeat, so the car to the left and the car to the right are equidistant.   

Guy parkers would park. They’d rush to class.

Channeling testosterone, I finish the parking job, utilizing the wiggle room between my car and Boyfriend’s Car to hedge my bet. Better to sidle up to the beau, than anger a car owner I don’t know.

 

Five hours later, I return to the ramp. There is a yellow piece of paper tucked under my windshield wiper. I am fuming. A ticket? Really? I try to remember the lectures in Driver’s Ed. Can you even get a ticket for parking too close to another car?

Hustling to the parking spot, I pull the paper from under the wiper. There, written in Boyfriend’s discernible scrawl are six words: NEXT TIME LEAVE ME A SHOEHORN.

I have never doubted a parking spot since.

This has been a challenge these past twenty years, because I am married to Mr. Spatial Awareness: a guy who doesn’t bother to slow down when advancing into a parking spot, a guy who parks forty three spaces away from the entrance of every market/arcade/pub/theatre just so we can use the legs God gave us and walk to our destination.

  

Mr. Spatial Awareness will be quick to speak up if he believes that Ms. Clueless is going to misjudge a parking space.

Mr. Spatial Awareness will be quick to judge any rethinking or repositioning related to parking.

Ms. Clueless learned long ago to let Mr. Spatial Awareness take the wheel whenever they get into the same car.

But now, Ms. Clueless appears to be back in the driver’s seat. An experiment conducted by UK’s National Car Parks has proven that women’s spatial awareness has been underrated. Either that, or males’ spatial awareness has been overrated.

When rated for technique, accuracy and time taken to park, women beat men’s scores handily. Sure, we may take a second or two longer to park, but we excel at finding a space, positioning the car centrally as we park, and reversing into a space.

 

The facts: “The study found that men often overlooked open parking spaces (really?) although they were found to be more confident in driving and better at driving forward into spaces (shocking!) Men were happier with the position of the cars once in the space (that’s done, next?!) as opposed to women who spent a little longer repositioning the car to centralize and perfect the positioning (a woman trying to perfect something- imagine!) Statistically half of the women in the study parked on center in the space, with only a quarter of men parking centrally."

Note: Do not blame men for overlooking open parking spaces. They simply want passengers in their cars to use the legs God gave them and walk. Either that, or they are spatially enough aware to understand that all those spaces they overlooked might have needed womanly perfecting and positioning.

Surprised?

Driving instructor Neil Beeson - who designed the scoring system - was “shocked” by the results. “….in my experience men have always been the best learners and usually performed better in lessons,” he said. “However it’s possible that women have retained the information better. The results also appear to dispel the myth that men have better spatial awareness than women.”

Many guy parkers are not pleased. James May, an English broadcaster, thinks the efficiency of parking should be judged on how central a car is to the cars parked beside it. “I don’t care what gender the person is next to me,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “I just don’t want them to bang their door on my Porsche.”

Others note that the study does not include parallel parking, which could allow guys to pick up a few points, leading to a parking stalemate.

    

Even Brian Willams took a stand on NBC Nightly News, reminding viewers that the study was done in the UK, where folks don’t even drive on the ‘right’ side of the road.

Sorry, fellas. 

The results are in. Research has determined that my spatial reasoning is as good as or better than yours. 

I am shouting, “Yeah, baby!"

Let’s go out and celebrate.

I’ll drive. 

You bring the shoehorn.

QUING Hereby Decrees:  Conventional wisdom is conventional.  Not wisdom.