On a brisk Tuesday morning, Corbin Muller pulled up his Volkswagen Golf to the day student parking lot, parked his car, and walked up the hill, following his ordinary routine.
But when he returned to the parking lot only a few minutes later, he found that sophomore Adam Pepper-Macias had positioned his blue truck so close to Corbin’s passenger door that he was unable to open it.
Corbin called Adam and asked him to move his car, but by that time juniors Tyler Davis and Caspian Ellis had arrived too. So, instead of parking their cars in a straight line like they normally do, the four students decided to leave their vehicles in a skewed clump with the fronts all tilted towards each other diagonally.
But that was only the start.
For the past week, the day student drivers have been spicing things up in the parking lot by parking in unexpected and entertaining configurations.
“I think it’s gone better than I ever could’ve hoped and created way more of a stir than I thought it was going to,” Adam said, who first started the ordeal by parking too close to Corbin on that first morning. “I thought it was just going to be a thing for just the day students, but now everybody’s talking about the day students and their cars.”
As the school day came to a close, the parking generated quite a bit of buzz around campus. Upon realizing that this was something that other people enjoyed, the original four students who started it decided they wanted to continue parking with their peculiar patterns.
So, they created a group chat, dubbing themselves the “Parking Bois.”
“Corbin, Adam, Caso and I have been choreographing these parking places every night,” Tyler explained. “We have a group chat where we talk to each other and see what we are going to do.”
On the second day, they decided to park with their vehicles facing the opposite direction, towards the amphitheater. As more and more students started to arrive, eventually the entire parking lot filled up with cars parking in the wrong direction.
Unknown to the students, their chosen parking structure turned out to be an accidental fire hazard by blocking a main evacuation point on campus in case of disaster: the amphitheater.
Headmaster Craig Floyd took notice of this and wanted to make sure the students knew to never block the amphitheater. But decided to make his announcement fun. He asked his administrative assistant, Dana Quinn, to help him brainstorm.
“At first Mr. Floyd wanted to give them LAPS, but then we starting thinking about it and were like, ‘let’s play the game a little bit,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Let’s have a little bit of fun. So, we came up with a scavenger hunt.”
One of the rules for day student drivers is that, at the start of the day, they have to turn in their keys to the front office. After class, they can pick them up.
At the end of the day, the seven student drivers came to the office to retrieve their keys to find three riddles written for each one of them, which would take them on a scavenger hunt around campus to get their keys back.
The riddles sent them to various parts of the campus, such as the mail room, cafeteria, solar panels, and flagpole. Upon finding all three clues, they would be sent back ultimately to Mr. Floyd’s office, where they had a conversation about how to have fun with the parking formations without creating any safety hazards.
Both Mr. Floyd and Ms. Quinn gave them the green light to continue mixing up how they park, as long as all safety requirements were met.
“I give them credit for having fun and following the rules they need to,” Mr. Floyd said.
The conversation and warning from Mr. Floyd on fire hazards was not the end of the line for the day students’ parking adventures.
The next day, the day student’s cars were parked in a “perimeter” like structure. Vehicles were lined up along the left and right sides of the parking lot, leaving a clear and large pathway to the amphitheater.
“Our last time parking we broke school rules, so the perimeter was a gesture to say ‘this time we’re not blocking the amphitheater.’” Tyler explained.
The OVS students and faculty are excited to see what bizarre and amusing parking formations will come in the future.
Although they didn’t intend to generate so much excitement on that first day, it goes to show that even the smallest of things can help brighten someone’s day.
“We wanted to add something new because the regular typical parking gets boring,” Junior Claire Alexander, who joined in on the parking prank, said. “We thought we’d bring some laughter [to] people who drive or walk by the parking lot.”
Reporting by: Kiana Carlisle and Bella Slosberg