I am the Parking Guru

In 1997, around 8 months after I started dating the woman who would later become my wife, we went to see U2 at Three Rivers Stadium here in Pittsburgh.  I had free tickets from my music industry job and was feeling like this was a fairly cool date.  And then on the way out of the parking lot, I made one wrong turn that took me into a traffic jam and would take well over an hour to escape.  Having to get up super early for her teaching job,  I could sense she was getting annoyed and it was enough to make me vow this sort of thing wouldn't happen again if I could help it. 

We went out to fun things like concerts, plays, comedy shows and sporting events a lot, and now I became obsessed with knowing the best places to park to get in and out easily, not pay an arm and a leg, and not walk miles and miles.  I tried out new places when out with other friends, asked as many people as I could for advice, and soon I could name just about every lot and garage in the city, and learned to look for the spots right by the exit ramps to save even more time.

Did I really become obsessive compulsive just to impress a girl?  I realized it was a deeper passion inside me to waste as little time as possible on things that could be easily solved.  A little research and trial and error has turned into huge time savings over the years.  It's the same type of thing I've obsessed over in my business career.  I've watched co-workers suffer through tasks that are huge wastes of time and if they would just invest the time to correct the system now, it would pay off in huge time savings going forward.  If you lose money, there's always the potential to make more.  When you waste time, you can't get it back.  

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