Parking for Our Dummy Neighbors

You can't legally park here, either, Becky

Ever heard the adage "Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer"? Few displays of internet dumbassery are more fascinating than seeing a penny-starved "freelance journalist" from some content farm attempting to answer a question that was itself apparently posed by a dumbass. Take, for instance, questions so broad as to be unanswerable (though a greedy freelancer tries anyway); or questions whose answers require so many qualifiers that they expand to fill all available space (sort of like Carrie Bradshaw's shoe collection). Here's an example: eHow.com contributor Rebekah Richards attempts, and fails, to answer the stupid question, "Illegal Places to Park a Car" at ItStillRuns.com.

As her fellow "contributors" have in so many other eHow posts, Rebekah immediately zooms in on the specific while ignoring the general. The answer, of course, is not to make a short list (as Richards did): it's to say, "Parking is illegal wherever prohibited by state or local ordinance." That would have been a good introduction. She could have also said, "Parking is illegal wherever prohibited by signs." Oddly, she included a picture of a No Parking sign, but never mentioned one. Dummy. No, Bekah just listed a few of the places where it's illegal to park, at least in New York City (according to her references):

Handicapped spots (for vehicles without a permit) Fire lanes Bus stops Tow-Away zones Fire hydrants Bicycle lanes Crosswalks Apparently Richards hasn't gotten around much, or maybe she flunked Driver's Ed. She forgot loading zones, corners, curves, yellow (and/or red) curbs, and a host of other places; even expired parking meters. She didn't bother to address such parking prohibitions as snow routes (maybe because she lives someplace where it rarely snows), scheduled street cleaning, or special events. She didn't bother to research local ordinances, either; such as, it's perfectly legal to park in bike lanes in some jurisdictions.

Rebekah's biggest fail, however, is that she clearly misinterpreted the assignment: most drivers are smart enough to know where it's illegal to park, and a thinking freelancer would have addressed issues such as double parking, parking "proud" (too far from the curb), parking with the vehicle straddling the curb, parking in a driveway across the sidewalk, parking in a yard, and the like. Those are some of the ways you'd pick up a parking ticket even though there was no sign in sight. 

That's the question Rebekah should have answered -- she didn't, but instead insulted our intelligence with a simplistic, not to mention incomplete, list of parking violations everyone already knows about. According to the rules of the Antisocial Network, that's plenty to qualify her as our Dumbass of the Day.

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