So tonight Jane and I went out on a date, and parked our car in this one particular parking garage downtown. It’s your basic simple multi-level parking garage: a spiral from bottom to top with two-way traffic going up and down in the middle and a row of parking places on either side. Because you have to go out exactly the reverse of how you came in, all of the parking places are perpendicular rather than oblique.

Usually this particular garage is fairly quiet, especially since the movie theater next door closed. Tonight it was quite busy, and we were stuck in a line of cars going up. Usually this means that some joker is waiting for a car to pull out and blocking traffic in the meantime. This time it was something different, something I’d never seen before in this kind of garage: the cars were waiting for some joker to finish backing into his parking space.

And then, once that car was settled and we could all move further in and further up, we noticed that there were lots of cars that had backed into their spots. I’d never noticed any before, and now, tonight, there were lots of them. (I counted eight just walking down one aisle.)

I’ve often seen cars parked facing out in lots where there are multiple rows of perpendicular parking on one level, especially when you can head in to a spot and then continue across the line so that you’re facing out in the next aisle over. But I can’t recall ever having seen it before in this kind of garage. Jane agrees; we’d never noticed anyone doing this before, and suddenly tonight a whole lot of people were doing it.

Is this like the new cool thing? Does somebody on a popular TV show make a habit of parking facing out?

I’m puzzled.

Has anybody else noticed anything like this? Or have we simply been unobservant?