The office at a previous job had a very small private parking lot, with ample signage saying that only people working in that building could park there and all others would be towed. However, there were a number of people who attended yoga classes in another building nearby who would ALWAYS park in our lot. Even stranger, a few people were notorious for parking their cars in front of other cars, blocking other cars from moving until that person drove away.
Keeping an eye out for “yoga parkers” was a company pastime. One coworker had a desk near the window and the moment a yoga parker settled in, the coworker would send a message about it and people would rush to be the one to call the tow truck on them. Window Coworker then switched to only telling the office manager about it when it happened and people complained heavily. It was unfair, they said! The yoga parkers are a menace, everyone should be allowed to help stop them! A few people switched to working in the conference room, which had windows overlooking the parking lot so they could be the first one to call the towing company. You could tell when it happened because suddenly the conference room would get unusually loud and aggressive. When the execs told people to stop hogging the conference room, coworkers started wasting time by regularly taking long breaks to walk through the parking lot like unpaid security staff.
The yoga parkers eventually caught on to this, but instead of switching to finding parking elsewhere, they figured out how long it usually took for the towing company to arrive and would run out to move their cars before that, drive around the block a few times until the truck left, then go back and park in their previous location. It was astonishing to see people carrying yoga mats run as if they were competing at the Olympics. Once, a coworker parked in front of a yoga parker’s car so they couldn’t leave. The yoga parker in question hid in a bush nearby, waited until the tow truck arrived and the coworker moved, then sprung out and bolted over. The tow truck person did nothing as the yoga parker drove away.
Eventually there was talk about sending a mole to spy on the employees of the yoga studio. People regularly spent time talking about it at lunches, plotting who to send and what would be a convincing cover and whether the mole should aspire to work their way up the studio ranks (yes, really). Planning this spying mission even came up in an all-staff meeting, although the CEO was smart enough to tell people to stop. I don’t know if a mole was ever actually sent to the yoga studio, but I doubt it.
The owner of the studio did eventually come by to try to make things right… by offering to trade use of the entire parking lot in exchange for free yoga classes for the executive teams of every business that worked in the building. This happened a few times before someone figured out that the owner was using it as an excuse to see if the most aggressive members of the Volunteer Parking Patrol were in, because they could use the lot for longer on days the VPP were out.
It took a year and a half for the yoga parkers to stop using the lot.
