Cruiser verses Backer

In Boca, there is no such thing as a stand alone grocery store.  All retail stores are located in neatly packaged "shopping plazas".  However, good luck finding these "shopping plazas" on your own as they are only advertised by small obscure signage far from the road and buildings are safely hidden behind lush tropical landscaping.  However, as neatly packaged as these "shopping plazas" are, they all have incredibly disorganized parking lots.  The parking lots are not the only problem.  The people of Boca have a very different set of road rules than the rest of the world.  In Boca, the proper thing to do if you are cruising through a parking lot, looking for the closest spot possible (and we wonder why there is obesity in America) is to quickly speed up if you see a fellow driver backing out of a parking space.  This is not done with the intention of taking the newly freed parking space once the backer has removed his vehicle from the prized spot but rather so the cruiser is not caused any delay in waiting for the backer to back.  The cruiser can than speed past the backer and continue to hunt for a proper parking space.  Make sense, right?  Well, it does around here.  In fact, if the poor cruiser were to end up hitting the backer in his haste, the backer would promptly be ticketed for causing such a public nuisance.  How dare he back out of that parking space while I'm trying to drive through this parking lot!

The point of this story is that I always imagined my parking lot accident, as is customary in Boca, to be a scenario similar to this.  Yet, I somehow managed to back out of my parking space and it was no easy feat I promise you.  I was even able to clear the entire parking lot and made it to the last stop sign at the exit of the "shopping plaza" when...KABOOM...we were rear ended.  It turned into a hit and run...literally.  The driver moved his car to a parking spot, got out of his car and simply walked away.  He never came back.  Meanwhile, I had a broken bumper and a trunk full of groceries in a town where everyone rubbernecks and no one stops to help.