If you love your car and care for it as though it were a family member, then you’ll make sure it is always clean, spotless and scratch-free. Which is why you don’t want other people to touch it. You hate it when strangers lean on it. And you totally lose it when small kids climb up its hood.

Alas, countless folks don’t share that love. The reality is that the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit if your car falls off a cliff. Which is why the average Joe doesn’t have a problem about putting a dent in your ride’s newly waxed sheet metal. You can see this in the way he opens his car’s door next to your prized possession, which seems invisible in his eyes judging by how he swings his door open without the slightest of caution, hitting your shiny vehicle and giving it a nasty dimple (or worse, an unsightly paint chip).

There’s a scene in the film The Art of Self-Defense in which Jesse Eisenberg’s weakling of a character personally witnesses a pickup truck owner banging a door against his sedan. When he confronts the culprit, the latter is completely unremorseful and even bullies him for even bringing up the misdeed. Just like in real life, yes?

The prospect of one’s beloved car getting damaged at a parking lot by some insensitive douchebag is precisely why some of us devise creative ways to prevent this thing from happening. Sometimes we use random objects to serve as protective buffers; at other times we insist on parking right beside a post or a wall so that no vehicle has a chance to inflict a door ding on at least one side of our car.

Door dings will no longer be an issue when all of us start respecting other people’s property. We should make it a habit to place a hand on our car door’s edge whenever we open said door so it doesn’t make contact with the vehicle parked next to us.

It’s just basic courtesy we want others to also extend to us even (and especially) when no one is looking.