Park on the Top Deck

While I'm a person of many words, I don't have many that even approach wisdom to share except these:

"Park on the top deck."

I'm writing about a multi-tiered parking garage, and I urge you to park on the top deck. This definitely goes against common practice. Whether due to laziness, impatience, habit, or convenience, we routinely scout for the closest parking spot on the lowest level.

How many people realize how much is missed in doing so?

I've never much liked the saying, "If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes," but I think it's appropriate here. Park on the lower level and you always see the same thing. Your car is, and, by extension, you are, just one more hunk of mobile metal among dozens of others. You leave your car to walk over a pre-determined path to a stairwell or elevator which takes you to a pre-determined sidewalk that will almost invariably take you in a predictably boring straight line to your destination. If you work in Cubeville, like I, you'll then likely spend your day walking along other pre-determined aisles of cubes and hallways that are fabric and metal on one side and drywall with boring art on the other. You'll probably spend 7-10 hours of your day in a pre-determined space of 6x6 or 8x8 or 10x1o. Am I the only one who finds it ironic that almost everything about the typical carpet dweller's workspace is pre-determined, bland, and in straight lines, yet employees are expected to think creatively? Trite though the saying now is, all managers want employees who can "think outside the box." Maybe if we were elevated six feet above our cubes, we'd be more successful at achieving that.

Most religions/mythologies claim that the greatest gift granted to humankind was free will. I find that ironic, too, since although we can exercise our free will by choosing to walk zig-zags over sidewalks and jaywalk over roads, we'll likely be ticketed or killed if we do.

So, the safest advice I can give you is to park on the top deck, where you can walk relatively safely in a crooked line or swirls or ellipticals around the floor before you go to your pre-determined path down the elevator shaft and onto the sidewalks. While you meander, you have the opportunity to see your environment in the way all those other lower-level cars do not: the sky, the top 15 levels of buildings, and even the un-curtained bedroom window of a condo where an impressively overweight and balding-yet-hairy man was dancing wildly...and naked.

How often do you see that when you're parked on one of the lower floors?