So, this has been bugging me all day and I have to say something.
Last night around 11:30, my girlfriend and I had been watching TV in the basement and she was about to go home when I heard a knock on the door. I was on my way to answer it when the doorbell rang as well. I answered and some guy I had never seen before was there.
He told me, in a rather angry tone, something along the lines of "I have been doing my best to be civil, but what do you think you are doing?" My first thought was for some reason that we had been making too much noise, but we weren't . . . well, we weren't making any noise besides the TV. He told me that one of the cars from our apartment (we have 4 roommates, 3 cars, and 2 assigned spaces; I park on the street) was parked where it wasn't supposed to be. I asked him to show me, he took me to where it was.
Given how furious and unpleasant he was, I am sure glad he was trying to be civil, I assume that if he was rude he would have just shot me in the face when I answered the door. Anyways, he was freaking out, even though the car he showed me wasn't really inconveniencing him or anything. It wasn't blocking anything. I didn't recognize it (and I told him), although I don't really know my roommates that well, and it had a tag that showed it belonged to our apartment. He told me that he had already called the tow truck and that next time he wouldn't bother to warn us. "Please don't", I would have said, had a) I thought of it before I left, and b) I wanted to be kind of a jerk. Anyways, I told him I would find out and went back to our apartment.
When I got there, it looked like everyone else was in bed, so I went to bed as well. At 1am, I got a message on my phone from one of my roommates, saying basically "thanks a lot for telling me I was going to get towed." Being awakened, I had to go to the bathroom, so I did. As I was going back to bed I saw said roommate, and I told him that the reason I didn't tell him was that I didn't know whose car it was and I didn't feel like waking everyone up to find out. He was pretty mad at me for the whole thing. I don't even know how he found out that I had known about it, but apparently he went outside when the tow truck was already there and moved it in time. The reason it was parked illegally is because there were no available spots (which shouldn't have happened unless nonresidents were taking them up, which in theory should lead to a towing.)
So I have a neighbor who comes to people's houses at 11:30 at night, knocks on their door, and threatens to call a tow truck for every illegally parked car he sees; and a roommate who is going to be angry at me because I didn't warn him that the car he parked in front of a sign saying that illegally parked cars will be towed, was going to be towed.