My about-to-be-ex-job has a pretty awful car park: it's basically an open lot with a bunch of lines to put cars in, three to a row, and whoever's parked nearest the wall has to get the other two cars behind them to move in order to leave the place. At some point last week I discovered my car was boxed in and the only driver I could lay hands on was the guy parked to the right of my car. To the rear left, there was a space that my car would possibly fit through given the correct angles. Here's a poorly-constructed diagram to illustrate from overhead:
In this diagram, my car is at A, the gap I have to go through is at B, Jim's car is at C and there are motorbikes, a HVAC unit, and another car (behind the red blob) blocking the potential exit route at D. The diagonal at B is wider than my car, but I'm going to need to take it at an angle other than the optimum perpendicular one in order to clear the navy blob (that'd be a BMW). Having decided that I could make it, I asked Jim to move his car back to point D so that I'd have room at the front to manouevre to the correct angle.
What I didn't know at this point was that Jim went back inside and relayed a rough description of the problem to my coworkers, whereupon several of them gathered at the window above point D to watch.
And take photos.
The first four show my skillful reversing through B; what you can't see, and indeed you'd need to be standing out in the parking lot to see it, is that there's about three inches of clearance on either side of the car.
And at this point the problem is essentially solved, but I have no depth perception and thus had to get out of the car to determine how much space I had left both at the back, where the BMW is, and at the front, where I wished to begin swinging the nose around behind the silver Yaris in order to clear the aforementioned BMW.
It took a little wiggling to get past the BMW, and one more wiggle once I'd cleared the Escort behind the BMW in order to line the car up properly for the exit, but as I reversed around that Escort there was a cheer from the window and I looked up to see my coworkers applauding me. I took a bow, and completed my exit.
Photos by Kevin O'Riordan