You should never look a gift horse in the mouth or—er, gift parking spaces, I guess, in this case.

When you’ve been enjoying a peaceable existence with your neighbor, who has put up with and been tolerable of your disruptiveness for far too long, it would be unwise to draw an arbitrary line in the sand that you yourself have been crossing for quite some time.

Anyone who has ever lived or worked near a school, or had the misfortune of trying to drive past one during drop-off or pick-up hours, can tell you what absolute chaos it is. Tens to hundreds of parents simultaneously trying to maneuver as close to the school as possible. And when it comes to pick-ups, parents arrive anywhere as early as 30 to even 45 minutes beforehand, parking up in every available spot on adjacent streets that don’t even have direct access to the school.

In this case, this small business owner shared parking spaces with a daycare, which occupied another tenancy in the building from which their business operated. Technically, they had sole rights to 24 parking spaces in front of their business, which were in a separate lot adjacent to the lot that contained the daycare’s 10. This, however, did not stop the daycare from effectively monopolizing the business spaces during pickup and drop-off time, which, like a good neighbor, the business owners allowed without complaint. They were, after all, seldom using the majority of them. However, this olive branch wasn’t extended both ways.

Sometimes, they would find that the hordes of parents were blocking them out of their entire parking lot when they arrived to work in the morning. One morning, they gave up and parked in the daycare’s spaces, and the daycare’s manager had no problem towing their vehicle almost immediately, despite the daycare’s ongoing use of the business’s entire parking lot. This, of course, was unacceptable and unneighborly behavior, and the simplest solution was removing the daycare’s access to the spots they had been abusing.