AIBU to refuse apologising after being blocked in at Tesco?

[ThisIsAbsolutelyCrazy]

So, yesterday I go to Tesco with DH. DH is a wheelchair user and has a Blue Badge.

There were no disabled bays or parent and child bays so I went to a far corner of the car park where there were two empty rows of normal bays and parked between 2 bays so had room for DH to get in and out.

Lo and behold we came back to a car parked so close to my driver's side that I couldn't get between the cars - less than 10 inches in between. The car had parked over into the bay I had half parked in.

We were obviously WTF. The other bays around us were still empty.

Coming round to the front of the cars, we saw there was a young lad no more that 15-17 sitting in the passenger seat of the other car. He obviously couldn't get out of his door either because it was up against mine! I said 'what kind of idiot would park like this' or some such. He said 'my dad'. Then asked him why he'd blocked him in.as well. He didn't answer and just kept his head down. I will admit I did swear a bit saying for fucks sake, this is fucking disgusting. Then said 'tell your Dad he's a complete cunt'. At no point did I make threats to the lad or swear at him. I knew he didn't park the car.

Anyway I then climbed in through the passenger side, moved the car into the row in front, got DH in and we left.

The Dad had not come back. I'm kicking myself because I didn't take a picture of the way he'd parked.

Anyway, tonight at around 8pm there's a knock at the door and two policemen are there. My heart dropped because I thought it was about one of the DC (both were out with friends), but they said they'd had a complaint about me causing 'fear and alarm' to a minor!

Turns out the Dad must have already had my reg number and told the police what I'd said. No mention of how he'd blocked me deliberately and left his son trapped in the car!

He must have known whoever came back to the car would be angry!

Anyway police said I could make a formal apology to the boy and the matter would not be taken further - this was because I admitted swearing.

I said No I will not as I had figured out by then that the Dad had done this all deliberately. No clue who he is.

AIBU to think he must be an absolute psycho?

Especially to leave his son trapped in the car!

Tbe boy didn't park the car @ThisIsAbsolutelyCrazy
You sound unhinged to take your anger and frustration out against a child.

You were so unreasonable its not funny. You cannot go around swearing at unknown teens.

That young lad may have been: anxious, been bullied, had a disability himself (you should know first hand that not all disabilities are visible).

You were rightly taken to task and held to account. I hope it scared some decency into you.

Your responsibility is to sort your own problems out. You could have unloaded the wheel chair out front and had DH wait for you whilst you parked up.

So then either he was parking like a twat to make a point or parking like a twat accidentally. Either way, he still parked like a twat and is a twat.

If you think calling a teenagers parent a cunt in front of them is tame - then you definitely have a problem. Its disgusting behaviour.

Omg the kid wasn’t trapped.

If he wanted to get out he could have climbed over and got out the drivers side. Just like you climbed over your passenger side!

You should have just been patient and waited for a disabled bay to become available.

But OP is dismissing it as 'only swearing in front of him; not swearing AT him'. As far as she's concerned, she just spoke to another person and said normal, acceptable words, with no aggression at all.

I get her frustration at the situation, but an adult has no justification whatsoever in verbally abusing an innocent child and forcing them to be a go-between in a dispute between adults.

I don't disagree with you.

Is this real? Police come out for a "swearing in a Tesco car park" incident?
That's madness.

Well, she shouldn’t have done that. But the police?!

Step away from GB news and social media, you might be a little bit more logical.
The Police attend hundreds of incidents in a week from dealing with fatalities, seeing children mauled to death and lots of other horrific things. They dont just deal with disputes, I think you can safely say these situations (If indeed real) are a minority and would be classed as a civil matter.

Why don't you volunteer your time and become a pcso instead of spewing your hatred and tarring every police officer with the same brush.

No but it’s still nuts and highly aggressive. Blocking someone in and leaving your child to deal with it? Then calling the police over it? That man has anger issues.

The man is a clearly a cunt, so you weren't wrong, but just to make it go away I would apologize. We are living in a world gone mad and the last thing you need is for this to escalate.

I agree but most people don’t see someone parked poorly and think “I’ll trap them out of their vehicle and show them!”

In the US this would end very badly.

There is nothing to suggest that the man has anger issues.

His parking was extremely bizarre and passive aggressive. However, he probably didn’t realise his son was going to be told “tell your dad he’s a cunt”.

The man sounds like a weirdo, but this is OP’s thread, she acted unreasonably by parking like a twat and acting like a twat.

I’ve been around enough men who want to teach strangers a lesson. They’re angry.

OP parked in such a way as to cause no one and any inconvenience and to allow her disabled husband to get in and out of their vehicle so they could shop for food.

She swore because someone purposely made it more difficult for them. Their lives are already hard enough. He gained nothing out of this little trick. He also left his son to deal with the consequences. That’s not a good parent.

It's certainly at the lower end of the spectrum of what you'd expect the police to be involved in; but if they've received a report of an adult verbally abusing a child and making him feel unsafe, I'm not surprised that they would follow it up. Normally, people insist that "You can't be too careful when it comes to child safeguarding".

I think 'she shouldn't have done that' is far too lenient here. It would have been unpleasant enough if it had been an altercation between adults; but an adult doing that to a child is abusive and disgusting.

I know what happened. I read the OP. You don’t need to repeat the events 🤣

I think the man in question was bizarre for parking so close to OP’s car on an empty row. I also think the OP was unreasonable to carry off how she did and should have waited for a disabled bay to become available.

The end. Goodnight.

The boy didn't do anything and had no say in it. How horrible to abuse him like that even while you acknowledge he was trapped in the car.

I remember when I was around 20, before I learned to drive, my boyfriend had parked his car in a lane, it wasn't quite illegal but was definitely in the way of some back shop entrances. He jumped out, said he'd only be a minute and left me sitting in the car while he ran in to grab something from a music shop. A couple of minutes later, a man came and was trying to get me to get in the driver seat and kept saying he would push the car out of his way. He was absolutely insistent and I felt so initimidated I got out and was actually getting in the driver seat, even though I could not drive, when my boyfriend came back and gave him what for (verbally).

It is AWFUL to abuse the passenger of a car for a driver's choices. Cowardly and awful. Poor kid.

It won't go to court either way, but you DEFINITELY should apologise, you owe him an apology.

Public Order Act 1986: Sections 4, 4A, and 5 make it an offense to use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior that cause or are likely to cause fear of violence, harassment, alarm, or distress. (Google tells me, with American spelling.)

1986 was a Conservative government, led by M Thatcher.

The person with the anger issues is the OP.

Having a vagina doesn't automatically confer saint status. Having a penis doesn't automatically equate to being an angry twat.

MN is becoming a hive of misandry and it needs to be called out just as much as misogyny. It even extends to boys and is getting to the point of np return.

It makes me sick when people are racist, homophobic, misogynist and latterly misandrist.

To be clear I am female.

Indeed - and not even just in the US. If the lad had been of 'rough' stock, like the teens and young men we've read a lot about in the news over the last few weeks, he very easily could have reacted by jumping out of the other side of their vehicle and physically assaulting OP, and maybe OP's DH too; could have pulled a knife or other weapon.

Would they have deserved it? 100% not; but did OP agitate and foment the conditions in which something like that was made far more likely? Certainly.

Even if the lad had 'just' got out and 'only' shouted and sworn at OP's DH - so effectively the same thing with one vulnerable, innocent, uninvolved party verbally abusing another vulnerable, innocent, uninvolved party... I wonder if OP would have been quite as dismissive of the matter then?

Of course it's ironic to require someone to apologise, and of course you can decline and let them proceed to investigate or press charges or whatever. Have they given you an exact script of what to write? If not, I'd consider just using the "apology" to recap what happened calmly and factually and apologise for the specific language you used, acknowledging that you knew it was not the boy's fault and were more generally expressing extreme frustration and worry for your husband.

As far as whether the dad's a psycho - no one here knows exactly what his motives were. In some cultures it would be completely normal and expected to park next to the only car in the lot, leaving as much space as possible for others. Or maybe he saw you park the car and chose to punish you because you were a woman taking up what he perceived as too much extra space and he spends too much time on Reddit. However, it doesn't sound like you've been asked to apologise to him, and what he did to you was almost certainly legal. As for leaving his kid there to "take the wrath" - if he intentionally blocked you in intending to do harm, then it's more likely that he left him there thinking that his presence would deter the car owner from keying his unattended car if you returned before he did.

Not bizarre. Aggressive. Obnoxious. Harassing. Probably illegal.

Or, more likely, the owner that was blocked in would pull out a weapon.

How do you feel about harassment of disabled people and their carers?