There is none, at Rockstar’s school. There’s a busy thoroughfare of traffic whizzing by at what looks to me, Mummy that I am, like 90 km/ hour right in front of the school’s doorstep and, unfortunately, I watched Pet Sematary.
(Stephen King decides to kill a toddler early on in this movie with a giant truck on a highway right in front of new family’s home near an old Indian burial ground that turns out to be very good at resurrecting dead pets and toddlers possessed by demons. (Oh, how I hate this man – he should use his brilliance to cure cancer or something, instead of scaring the crap out of mummies everywhere.))
So anyway, traffic in Hong Kong scares me. We were in a mild-ish (ie no one got hurt) 5-car accident on the highway few years back – 1 car broke down in the fast lane just beyond a hill. 4 cars simply couldn’t stop in time.
Taxis scare me. Navigating the Causeway Bay crowd, occasionally a local friend or two will remark “Watch out for the taxis. Do you know how many pedestrians they bump each year?” We’ve been rammed into – hard – from the side by a taxi joining traffic who simply hadn’t seen us because he was looking the other way and the driver’s, “So it’s just I didn’t see you, do you know how much it’s going to cost me to fix my own car, I’ve been punished enough,” attitude is the Absolute Scariest.
(So what, it’s not a biggie he plowed into our car out of nowhere when he was joining traffic?? Thank God Rockstar wasn’t in the car.)
But Rockstar who can form some very strong dislikes, likes it at ESF. And from having no friends, he now has a best friend (a little Indian boy I snuck a peek at on our school run today) and at least 2 or 3 others he’ll occasionally also mention. One of them is even – wait for it – a girl (though all the other girls are still “silly”.)
We wanted Rockstar to have a school bus experience. But after the lady at the bus company estimated he would have to board the bus a whopping 90 minutes earlier from where we live, we pay a friend to pick the car up from Kings’ office after he drives himself to work, then come pick Rockstar and me (about 20 mins one-way). Because yours truly hasn’t driven in 17 years since she got her kopi-o license and Kings is not about to trust his only child to kopi-o license’s driving.
There’s no parking and no waiting in front of the school – at least not legally. So this is where the blog post really starts.
Rockstar’s school parking (or lack thereof) is a behavioral science student’s dream:
Keeping the pick-up/ drop-off area in front of the school congestion free is an exercise in the kind of teamwork and community-minded-ness that most of us parents/ caregivers have yet to master. Because it involves our children and our convenience.
It’s like going without the comfort of say, air-conditioning in summer (like during Hong Kong’s recent Air-Con-Free Day) to help put a stop to global warming, knowing that the clean air benefit will not be yours alone but will be shared by some other idiot who doesn’t give up his air-con. But with children involved.
It’s easier to be magnanimous when it doesn’t inconvenience you. When you don’t care. That’s uh, not called being magnanimous. It’s called Not Caring.
1. If you are a mum who reads the school newsletter avidly, you would have seen the umpteen pleas by the school to try and keep the pickup / drop-off area congestion-free, in varying degrees of politeness.
It would take the hide of a rhino to park there, go upstairs to drop your child off, and engage his teacher in a leisurely conversation about the quality of your child’s artwork.
(Yet if you could do so in relative anonymity, you might still try it on occasion*)
2. If you are a mum who doesn’t read the school newsletter or are not directly involved in the dropping off of your child, you’re kinda off the hook. (Hey, are you pretending you didn’t read it? Of course you actually read your child’s school’s emails avidly.)
3. If you are a mum who thinks school staff can recognize her and they know you read the newsletter – you’re pretty much screwed.
I’m not serious, but then there’s another thought for potential issue-raising mums – it’s too late for me, I have a blog with our pics plastered everywhere, even the dog may no longer poop where she pleases in the blissful anonymity that affords a relative lack of accountability – BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR YOU! SAVE YOURSELVES!
*Like Dubner and Levitt’s experiment involving a cash box – when there was a smiley face on the box, people were more likely to abuse the perceived additional anonymity with which they could decide how much to pay for the cookies they bought. But put a pair of watchful eyes, and more people paid the correct amount (or more).
So for the umpteenth time, I ask our Friend Who’s Driving Us By Way Of Cushy Odd Job Til His Business Takes Off to make a round rather than park, however briefly, outside. It’s a request I’ve made since the first day he’s been driving us.
(I’m not a saint, it’s just reflex.)
Occasionally he’ll oblige, but most days he still won’t do it because the other drivers are starting to piss him off. The horn leaning, the sitting there reading papers… Each time we pull up at the school entrance, he says, “Look at everyone else. I’m not doing it til I actually see other people bothering.”
And then, however briefly, I catch myself thinking – I’m pissing my own friend off for this. What have others done about the professional drivers they employ who are sitting there reading papers? Did they even read the school email? Do they even know their drivers do that?
So everyone’s going to have to get a ticket. And I hope my friend doesn’t manage to drive away quite fast enough when that happens. Then we don’t have to talk about this every time we do school run.
(Dude, you’re paying for that yourself. But I promise not to say “I told you so.” Even though I’ll be thinking it.)
Ps: The dog doesn’t really poop where she pleases. She’s not a saint, it’s just reflex.
