It’s a typical day as a high school student. The last bell just rang, marking the end of the long eight hour day, which included a calculus test on multivariable derivatives, an economics lesson on (something…?), a bad hair day and maybe even a few tears shed during a passing period. You would think the worst part of your day would be over, right? Nope. Because you are actually not a typical high school student. You are a Redwood student who has a parking spot in one of the lots on campus. For you, the bell doesn’t mark the end of the school day. It marks the beginning of the worst part of it all: escaping the parking lot. Suddenly, you will wish you could return to that brutal calculus test because no matter how hard it was, nothing is worse than the traumatic, triggering and anxiety-causing adventure you’re about to experience.

What is the root cause of every issue in the parking lots? Whoever started the false and hypocritical narrative that teen drivers are the problem has obviously never driven around Redwood parents. For some unimaginable reason, the second a parent enters the lot to pick up their child, all their common sense, logic and decision making skills disappear, causing them to wait in the most inconvenient spots. They funnel down the main rows of the lot, park and sit on Facebook reels while waiting for their child. While this process may seem orderly, what those parents fail to notice is that they have blocked one, if not both rows of parking, leaving upperclassmen enraged as they are unable to leave their spots.

If your car happens to be blocked in by an insufferable Marin mom (and it will be), you will be left with two choices: honk or suffer in silence. Due to the incomparable frustration of this experience, you will likely be too angry to pick the second option. You lay on the horn, maybe throw your hands up and hope you don’t have to honk again. Once the painfully oblivious parent finally moves just enough so that you almost scratch a car (the worst form of public humiliation), the madness begins again.

You are now tasked with the seemingly impossible yield situation where hundreds of cars fight for their spot on the final stretch. Whether it is due to blatant incompetence or their superiority complex is unknown, but for some reason, parents truly believe that they deserve to cut you off in this process despite the fact that you have been waiting for eight hours to leave. When I enrolled at Redwood for the student experience, I didn’t realize it included a weirdly intimate face-off with a dad in a Porsche who is trying to cut me off. At this stage in the process, you lay on the horn again. Is it still called road rage if you haven’t even gotten on the road yet?

Now, you see the exit, the finish line, the end of your traumatic journey. You are so close, but there is still one major obstacle: the parents parked in the fire lane in front of the school to wait for their child. This inconsiderate, obnoxious and illegal maneuver may leave you in tears because you have to once again suffer the consequences of someone else’s inability to drive in a safe and orderly manner.

Around this time in your day, you will be so hangry and sleep-deprived that you won’t have any fight left in you. You will be left wondering how all the parents you just encountered are licensed. Was the driving test easier back then? Did they never learn parking lot etiquette? Why is there a generational gap in manners, skill and intelligence? Unfortunately, we will never know the answers to these questions. As students, all we can do is keep honking, keep defending our turf and hope that we never become incompetent drivers like Redwood parents.