Parking

2 Pages 583 Words

Have you ever got to work, only to find out that you can’t punch in for another half hour? That’s exactly what hundreds of employees at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak go through each day. Trying to fit the cars of 7,000 employees into one parking lot sounds pretty tough on its own, but if you add any patients or visitors that decide to park there, it is nothing short of impossible.
I work at Beaumont hospital, which is one of the busiest hospitals in the Metro Detroit area. There are thousands of employees that work there, but only one lot on campus for them to park their cars in. There are three off-site lots where employees can park and take a shuttle in to work. This, however, is extremely inconvenient and time consuming. You have to drive about five or ten minutes away from the hospital, wait until the bus arrives, and another 10 minutes is wasted on the bus ride there. Once you finally get there, you have to walk from the shuttle drop off point to your area of the hospital. By the time you finally punch in, it is about a half hour later than the time you would have gotten there had you been able to park in the parking lot at the hospital.
Many employees come in to work and find that the on-campus parking lot is full. A number of them proceed to the visitor parking lot and try to sneak in. They are then greeted by a parking employee, whose job it is to tell them to hit the road. This frustrates them because if a patient or visitor decides to park in the closer employee lot, they are not given a hassle about it. In a place that doesn’t even have room for its own employees, how can they justify taking even more spots away for those who have a lot designated for them. If they have an area to park in, they should use it. Luckily I start work at 6:00 am and the lot is virtually empty when I get there, so I am not effected by this problem, but I used to come in a few hours later, so I know what it is like.

...