I had a weird first-hand encounter with carbrain the other day. I had been grocery shopping with my six-year-old and we returned to our car. After loading groceries and offspring into the car, I noticed a man standing beside the car next to mine, talking to someone.

He was in his fifties and looked like a perfectly serious and respectable member of society. The sort of man who might be a project manager or accountant. He wore thick, round glasses and his lazy eyes made it impossible to tell where he was looking.

It turned out he was looking at me.

Apparently I had parked too close to the line demarcating the territories of our respective parking kingdoms and was now blocking the door to his car, a nice Volkswagen considerably newer than my old shitbox. To be fair, he may actually have had a point. I was parked a bit too close.

We all make mistakes, me included, and I was perfectly happy to correct this one immediately. More importantly, I was already leaving, meaning his problem was about to resolve itself without any intervention from his side.

But he did not want a solution. He wanted a discussion about my moral character and demanded a detailed account of my logic for having parked like that.

I’m not generally in the habit of humouring angry strangers in supermarket car parks, so I ignored the questions and simply said, “Well, good thing I’m leaving then,” and got into my car.

Unfortunately, this was not sufficiently submissive to appease him. The respectable-looking accountant/project manager belched out that I was an idiot.

At this point I decided that pretending this hadn’t happened would be socially irresponsible. People are supposed to experience consequences for behaving like this, otherwise you cruelly deprive them of the opportunity for personal growth. So I got back out and calmly told him to calm down, talk properly, and act like an adult.

Unfortunately, he declined this invitation. Instead, he triumphantly announced that he had photographed my licence plate and was going to post it on…

And then he stopped himself. There was a little pause. Maybe he realised that he didn’t know where this threat was going either. Maybe he realised he had revealed too much information about his secret brotherhood of vehicular vigilantes.

Genuinely curious about what misfortunes he deemed himself capable of causing me, I asked where, exactly, he intended to post it and what he imagined this would accomplish. He wouldn’t tell. But I understood from the context that this was supposed to scare me, although I struggled to see what mischief he could actually use a picture of a license plate for.

But two can play this game, so I photographed his licence plate too, mostly to establish a principle of reciprocity. This absolutely did not improve his mood. He shouted about reporting me to the police and God knows what else.

At this point I concluded that the situation had passed beyond my modest pedagogical abilities. I got back into my car. I might possibly have called him completely nuts in the process. I’m not necessarily proud of this, but in my defence, he had made a compelling case for the conclusion.

I reversed out of my parking space. As I was shifting into first gear, my new friend started reversing too, and would have driven straight into me if I hadn’t slammed the horn. Maybe he wanted to intimidate me; maybe he was simply too incandescent with rage to check his mirrors.

Fortunately, nothing happened. I was relieved for him. His blood pressure was already operating somewhere in the stratosphere, and I fear the realisation that he would be at fault, and thus on the hook for a new car for me, instead of pocketing an insurance payout for his own, might actually have finished him off.

We drove out of the car park and the guy kept following us. With my six-year-old in the car, I started wondering what I would actually do if he followed us home and decided to turn an already stupid encounter into something even dumber. I began planning how to get my kid safely inside while I dealt with him.

Eventually he drove off. Perhaps he calmed down after asking himself the same question people always say a dog chasing a car should ask:

What exactly am I going to do if I catch it?

The whole thing could have been avoided effortlessly. He could have got into his car considerably faster by doing literally nothing and waiting thirty seconds for me to leave. If he felt compelled to point out that I had made a mistake, he could have said, “you’re parked a bit close,” I would have muttered an apology, felt slightly embarrassed and moved my car immediately. Instead he chose to have a meltdown in public.

All this over a parking space.