The Parking Spot I Cleaned for Ten Years Was Never Mine

 The Parking Spot I Cleaned for Ten Years Was Never Mine

I run a convenience store in South Korea. This is my tenth year.

There is a small parking space at the front of the building. It fits one car. If you push hard enough, you can fit two cars, one behind the other. It is not really a parking lot. It is just a narrow strip of ground between the building wall and the street.

For the first few years, I cleaned it. I swept cigarette butts. I picked up snack wrappers. After rain, I wiped the puddles so customers would not slip. I also picked up trash that people left on the sidewalk in front of my store. Sometimes people threw food waste near my shop. Sometimes they secretly dumped their garbage into my store's trash can. I cleaned all of it. But no matter how long I cleaned and used this space, I could never say it was mine. No one asked me to clean it. No one thanked me. I did it because a dirty entrance means fewer customers, and fewer customers means I cannot pay rent.

The building owner lives somewhere else. He collects rent from me on the first floor and from the small one-room apartments upstairs. Three years ago, water started leaking from the ceiling of my storage room. The problem came from the pipes in the apartments above. I told the building owner. He said he understood. He did not fix it. He told me to be patient. Three years later, the ceiling still leaks. The rent went up.

During those years, I noticed something. When a one-room tenant had a problem, the building owner listened. He gave them time. He gave them help. He showed understanding. When I had a problem, he gave me silence.

In this building, problems are not solved based on how much rent you pay. They are solved based on who has the stronger position. I pay six times more rent than any one-room tenant. But the building owner thinks differently. I am someone who has built a customer base over ten years. I have stock, routines, and regular customers. Where would I go? But a one-room tenant can ask for money, complain, and leave anytime. The building owner is not afraid of the person who pays the most. He is afraid of the person who can leave the easiest. This is probably why, no matter what I ask for, the building owner says nothing.

So I stopped cleaning the parking space. Not because I was angry. I just realized that taking care of someone else's building for free — while that person ignores my leaking ceiling and raises my rent — was something I could no longer afford to do.

This morning, I arrived at 6 a.m. for work. There was a car in the parking spot. It belonged to a young woman who rents one of the rooms upstairs. For ten years, that spot was used for the store. For deliveries. For my car during work hours. For customers. She parked there anyway.

At 6:30, I called her. I was polite. I asked if she could move her car to the inner side, so I could park behind her. I told her that whenever she needed to leave, I would move my car first. She came down, moved her car somewhere else, and told me not to call her this early again.

Everyone in this neighborhood knows I start work at 6 a.m. When you do the same thing for ten years, people know. But knowing and caring are two different things.

That was it. No fight. No agreement. No promise about tomorrow.

I said okay and opened the store.

When I tell people about things like this, they always say the same thing. Stand up for yourself. Talk to the building owner. Why are you giving in? They say this as if I had never thought of it. As if I had not spent ten years learning which fights in this building get results and which fights just make noise.

In Korea, most conflicts run on feelings. The person who shows the most pain, the most anger, the most sense of being wronged — that person usually wins. Not because they are right, but because dealing with them costs more than just giving in. The building owner knows this. The tenants know this. I know this too.

So I do not fight. I do the math.

The parking problem will be solved in twenty months. That is when I close the store and start a different job. The leaking ceiling will become the next person's problem. The woman upstairs will keep parking wherever she wants. The next store owner will either learn what I learned, or leave faster than I did.

In the meantime, I am looking at a Honda Super Cub. It is a small motorcycle that does not need a parking spot. The math is simple. A new one costs about 2.7 million won. It holds its value well when you sell it later. And it removes one thing I cannot control. It does not solve the problem. It goes around the problem. In ten years of running my own business, I have found that the solutions that actually work are almost always this kind.

Sometimes I think about this. Surviving is the most expensive revenge. Not because it costs a lot to survive — though it does — but because it is the one thing that no one can take from you. Not the person who yells louder. Not the person who gets angry easier. Not the person who has a better position than you.

I cleaned that parking spot for seven years. It was never mine. But I am still here, and the three tenants who complained about me over the years are already gone from this building.

That is the only math that matters.