Driving Shame

[thefourthvine]

Our neighbor across the street is a very fine man who should just not drive. Ever. Once, as Best Beloved watched in bemused astonishment, he backed his SUV-type-car smack into the little red sports car he loves but almost never drives (because he has kids). He just - he put that car in reverse and hit the accelerator and did not stop until there was a CRUNCH sound. And then the sports car had to go away for a few weeks.

Twice, he's managed to back out of his driveway and somehow hit his lawn instead of the street. Twice. And I don't mean just brushing his lawn with a single wheel; he backed right straight across its lovingly-maintained greenness and dropped into the street off the curb with a resounding, car-shaking thump. And that's just what we've seen, and it's not like we watch him every minute, or even most minutes. (I will admit that I've thought occasionally that a webcam pointed at the front of his house would be bound to yield interesting results.)

It has reached the point where, if we're anywhere on the street and we see him getting into his car, we retreat at least fifty meters and try to put a solid barrier between him and us. And then we watch, because we know it will be good. (On Sunday, we had a 5.0 Richter scale earthquake. When it started, we were bathing the earthling, and as the house shook we looked at each other and said, "Either it's an earthquake or the neighbor just backed into our house.")

Best Beloved finds this pathetic. He's a nice man, he's successful, he has nice kids and a nice partner and a nice life, but when he goes into reverse, he takes his life and his insurance premiums in his hands. I, on the other hand, am entirely sympathetic, and here's why.

When I took driver's ed, I had never been behind the wheel of a car. I couldn't be covered by my parents' insurance until I had a learner's permit, and I couldn't get that until I had driver's ed, and to my parents, that meant that I could not so much as sit in the driver's seat. Which, fine. I doodled through several boring lectures and averted my eyes through many gruesome movies. And then came my big day. I showed up at the "range," which was an old motocross course the driver's ed people had bought and used to break in their students before they inflicted them on the actual public streets. And I expected I would learn how to drive.

Except. What happened was, we were all put in cars and told to just - go. No instructor in the car; he sat in a little tower and shouted at us through a radio. No instruction in, you know, how to drive. And everyone else was fine with that; they climbed into their cars like old pros and went. So I tried to, and I did fine. Until we were ordered to put our cars in reverse. Everyone else backed neatly and efficiently from one orange cone to another. I backed the car straight into a ditch. And I mean into that ditch. I couldn't get it out. The instructor couldn't get it out. Later, they had to bring a giant crane in to get it out. I am totally not kidding.

As I got out of my butt-down, teetering car and walked in shame back to the waiting area, the instructor yelled at me, "Why didn't you TELL me you didn't know how to drive?" And I didn't know what to say. It was my first range session. Of course I didn't know how to drive. I couldn't figure out how all those other people did. Didn't their parents worry about their insurance?

Anyway. Several years later, I was in college, and I was relating this story to a group of friends, as I have done many many times because it's one of those humiliations I cannot stop replaying in my head (especially, oh god, the jump down from the elevated driver's seat, and the long hot walk while everyone stared at me from their non-ditched cars, and the half-hour miserable wait while everyone else drove), and one of the people in the group sat bolt upright. "That was YOU?" he said. "They told us about you! You're FAMOUS!"

He took driver's ed two years after I did. They were still telling the tale of the girl who didn't know how to drive and backed into a ditch and they had to get a crane to get the car out. For all I know, they're telling it even now. It was yet another time in my life when I got to be the Horrible Example.

So I can relate to our neighbor. I haven't backed into a ditch in many years - really, it was just the once - but I still flinch every time I shift into reverse.

And the thing is, as we were talking about it, Best Beloved disclosed her own reverse shame story - one she had not previously told anyone, not even me, even though we've been married more than fifteen YEARS. I will not relate it here on the extremely off chance that the owner of other car reads this. (Also, she would hurt me.) And I shared with her a story I had never told anyone before, about how I hit the mailbox and knocked the whole thing into the street and didn't notice and a neighbor picked it up and put it on our lawn and my parents thought it was the victim of mailbox baseball (a popular pastime where I grew up) and cursed a little bit and then my father put it back up. And I never told them otherwise.

So we shared these stories, and then I started wondering how many other people have driving shame stories to share. (By "driving shame," I don't mean "I never use my turn signals." I mean, like, "I forgot to put the parking brake on and it rolled into the street and sat there for hours, forcing all our neighbors, as they returned from work, to drive into someone else's driveway to get around it.") I'm hoping it's not just Best Beloved and me and the guy across the street who have these stories. I mean, I can think of five of them right off the bat, including one that scares me more now remembering it than it did when I did it.

And the thing is, these are all more terrifying now, because we have the earthling. It's one thing to look back in shame; it's entirely another thing to be looking ahead in horror.

So: do you have any driving shame stories? I want to hear them! Not only will I feel less like an idiot (I backed into the ditch oh my god); I will also have a great resource to show the earthling in about 16 years, when he asks why he can't get a license.

Comments

[kass]

Driver's Ed, where I came from, involved driving lessons in a car with a driving instructor (who had his own brake, so he could avert any misguided attempts to drive the car into, say, another car) and with another bored student in the backseat -- we would trade off and take turns. I found it stressful, but once I'd done driver's ed I was supposed to "practice" with my parents, which was even worse -- driving my mother's precious car with her in the front seat omg! I almost had a heart attack.

So anyway. I learned to drive fine. But apparently it never occurred to me to pay attention to the, um, gas gauge? So the very day I got my license, I drove a friend home across town and promptly ran out of gasoline and had to stop in the middle of the road and walk to a payphone and ask my father to get a can of gas and drive out to where I was and rescue me.

Then, that night, I put a big dent in their Suburban (it was the spring formal, at a hotel downtown; I had to park in a parking garage; Suburbans are large!)

It was not the best first-day-of-driver's-license ever, let me tell you. *g*

[plumeberry]

Oh gosh, I have done that. I was going up a hill and all of a sudden my car just stopped and would not move. Fortunately, a neighbour had arrived home and was able to give me enough petrol to get to a garage. I moved away after then so luckily I don't have to see my neighbour everyday.

[montanaharper]

Um. A boyfriend tried to teach me to drive his stick-shift (no, that's not a euphemism *g*) before I was actually legal to have a permit, and I totalled his car. Cornered too fast, slid it into a raised median and bent the axle. And he was drinking a beer in the passenger seat at the time. *koff* Yeah, not the sharpest crayon in the toolshed when I was young. *g*

[fjbryan]

You know those big intersections--the kind where a 5 lane + turn lanes crosses/meets another 5 lane + turn lanes--where there's huge traffic, lots of lights, and amazing potential for death? In driver's ed, I was at the back end of the turn lane waiting for the light to change to an arrow, making it legal for folks in our lane to cross in front of the other 6+ lanes of perpendicular traffic. The light changed, cars in our turn lane advanced. I forgot to check the arrow was still green when I reached the head of the line--I just kept going, and the car ahead of me went through on red to begin with. I was following him! Really! The driving instructor (like kass, with his own foot brake, so he could avoid certain DEATH) did nothing. I realized as I turned through the intersection what I had done wrong, and how the oncoming drivers might have broadsided us--hell, they could have killed us both.

We were about 20 yards down the road, going safely, when I asked him why he didn't hit the brakes. "Because I thought we had a better chance if you got us through the intersection than if I stopped us in the middle of it."

[florahart]

"Because I thought we had a better chance if you got us through the intersection than if I stopped us in the middle of it."

Which is basically true, once you were in the intersection--an oncoming driver trying to avoid you can't predict at what point you might realize and slam on the brakes, so behaving predictably (continuing at the speed at which you were already going) is probably a better bet.

Actually, I think that's pretty good instructor behavior, aside from that he should have prevented you from going in in the first place. A bad instructor would have screamed at you in an "oh god oh god we're all going to die" way in the intersection, leading to probably significant freaking out, possibly being unable to continue, having to get out and switch places to gtfo of the intersection, and ongoing drama.

(edit for HTMFail)

[wolfshark]

I was following a friend who was driving a UHaul truck. They stopped at the light. I... didn't, and drove right into the back of the truck, totaling my car.

[ignaz]

I had pulled into a parking spot, and the spot facing me was empty, so rather than back out, I decided to just pull through. I somehow forgot about the cement block bumpers separating the parking spaces. I went right over it with my front tires. Then, not knowing what else to do, I reversed.

I like to imagine that lots of other people have done this.

ETA: Oh, my mom has also done the backing out of the driveway and right into your own car thing, only the car she backed into was mine. Big dent in the bumper. Interestingly, it popped back out on its own after a few hours. Toyotas are magic.

[sanj]

I confess I did that, once. The resulting K-THUNK has kept me from trying it again. ;)

[kellyfaboo]

Let's see. I got distracted for a moment while driving through a neighborhood with curves and no curbs and took out someone's mailbox -- while I was leaving a note in their door their neighbors looked at me like I was a serial killer. But when they called they said they were glad I left a note, I was the first person who had hit their box to do so. I ended up paying $30 for a new stand for the box.

Bumper to bumper traffic swerved right, I didn't then couldn't because I was boxed in and I hit a car that was turning left in front of me. Totaling my car by virtue of the airbags deploying. It ended up being a blessing because the engine was going out, and I got $1k over bluebook for the car. But I then payed that back with higher premiums for three years. Now, even if everybody else is bumper to bumper I maintain more than ample breaking distance. Even if it annoys the people around me.

My drivers ed story: For my drivers' ed we were picked up by our driving instructor and 2 of the 3 drivers drove in the morning before class. Then the classroom portioned happened at the highschool. Everybody else in my car had PhysEd in the afternoon so I was the only one in the car during my lesson. The first morning we drove around the county, but in the afternoon directed me downtown. During lunch rush hour. I took right turn wide and came face to face with a Mac Truck at a stoplight. Thankfully I got back into my lane -- while screaming.

In the end, he gave me an A+, even after I argued with him, and said "Driver is very confident".

[lambourngb]

I once locked myself inside my boyfriends car.

Um yeah. One of those panic moments where it didn't occur to me that I could pull the little tab up and it unlocked the door. I couldn't even plead child locks. I beat on the window and motioned I couldn't get out. He said "Why don't you hit the unlock trigger?"

No, I hadn't be drinking, and I wasn't sleep deprived. I plead that a past life soul from the horse-drawn carriage days took control for a moment and I was flummoxed by it.

He gets a lot of mileage out of that. It doesn't help I'm a natural blonde.

Another good one

[lambourngb]

Oh yeah, and I forgot, the story of how I got my license! I had a drivers permit for years, like from the time I was 16 until I was 25. These permits have time limits, so being lazy, and living in a city where I had public transportation, I wasn't motivated to turn it in for a full license. I just used the permit as photo ID. Eventually I had to go to DMV to get my permit renewed.

This required studying for the test. So I took my test, got 100 percent, and then waited patiently for someone to approve the test and send me to get my picture taken.

Meanwhile the woman who was going to wait on me for the paperwork process was giving a road test to a very green driver. She came back from that with her hands shaking, "thanking the good lord above" over and over again. She told me the little girl who was driving the car, pulled out in front of a dump truck and then didn't step on the gas until the last moment. The poor instructor was so rattled by this, that while she was filling out my paperwork, she marked me down for license renewal, not permit renewal.

So yes, I got my license without performing the driving test. *g*

[cypher]

When I was in college, my first car was broken into. The damage was pretty minor -- instead of breaking the window, the thief had pried the frame outward just enough to be able to reach the lock. (The police officer who responded made it sound like this sort of thing happened all the time, with Accords of that vintage.)

Impatient to have someone take care of it, I decided to take the car across town to a body shop where I could find out what it would cost to have it fixed. And I got stuck on a busy street behind a parked UPS truck making a delivery. I waited through a change of the light for a good clear opening where I could dart past the truck and back into moving traffic. Good openings were hard to come by, and on the second change of the light I tried for a not-so-good opening -- I would have to floor it, but surely I would be able to get up to speed fast enough to avoid an accident.

Unfortunately I hadn't cut the wheel sharply enough to the left, and plowed straight into the back of the parked delivery truck.

The driver was very kind about it, and told the responding police officer that I hadn't done his truck any damage at all (it's possible I hadn't, apart from a little scuffed paint), so I wouldn't have to deal with the extra insurance headache. Which was good, because I had already done upwards of $5,000 worth of damage to my car and didn't see it again for three weeks.

Not my cleverest moment.

[melannen]

I think I would've preferred your driver's ed to mine: my driving instruction consisted of driving the instructor to the convenience store so he could buy donuts, and then getting yelled at for obeying the posted limits on the way back instead of speeding. I was already leery enough at getting in a car alone with a strange 40-year-old unshaven man; his utter lack of anything did not help.

My driving shame stories mostly consist of causing minor dents or fender-benders in my mom's car and then not telling her about it since the other person didn't ask for insurance info. (I agonized about the not-telling part for months afterward in all three cases.)

Oh! And I got a ticket for running a red light on the way home the day I got my driver's licence! Well, I might've, anyway. It was an automated red-light camera, and the time it claimed I ran it didn't quite match with the time I was driving, so Dad took the blame, since he drove the car by there later that evening, but it didn't match his time either. So it was probably me, but I if I did, I was too wound up to notice.

Also, I once lit the clutch on fire by riding it, and had to be told by the guy next to me at the red light that my car was smoking, managed to pull over, and then panicked for ten minutes because I couldn't get the car to turn back on. (It wouldn't turn back on because you had to put the car in park before starting it. I did not think of this, however, until I'd already panicked all over the place for some time.)

And I drove around for two weeks once with my high-beams on because I didn't realize what that light on the dashboard meant. (I just never use the high beams, so I have no idea how they got turned on that time, considering I didn't even know how in that car.)

...we won't even talk about how I usually add an extra half-hour to travel times for the "driving around in circles being lost" portion.

[fox]

I'm confused by "the clutch" and "put the car in park" in the same car. What kind of car is that? (I don't doubt you. I'm genuinely asking.)

[ellen_fremedon]

Oh god. I never actually did learn to drive. I took Drivers' Ed, and I passed the class, but only because if he'd failed me, the instructor would have just had me again the next semester, and by that point he never wanted to see me again. But I never took a driving test-- I never got to a point where I could have passed one before I left for college.

But, yes! Before we got in the car the first driving day, the instructor asked who had driven a car before, and I raised my hand, because I had. (Twice. Both times in the previous week-- my father had been flabbergasted to learn that Drivers' Ed didn't actually teach you to drive; he'd have been making me practice long before that if he'd known he was going to have to teach me.)

So we got in the car, and I got behind the wheel and asked what I needed to do. "You said you'd driven a car," said the instructor. "Yes," I said, "but I haven't started a car." And I explained that my parents hadn't wanted me driving the car out of the driveway, as their insurance wouldn't cover a collision with one of their other vehicles. The driving instructor was not pleased.

So he had one of the other students in the car drive us out north of town, looking for the remotest stretch of road they could find. What he found was the one road in the county that wasn't straight-- a winding one-lane dirt road alongside a creek bed, with trees on either side obscuring the view ahead. This was where he turned the car over to me.

I managed, somehow, to navigate it. And to make a blind turn back onto the main road (which was still gravel, but was at least out of the trees.)

And found myself in the middle of an Amish funeral procession, horses and buggies choking the road for fifty yards ahead and behind.

That was-- not fun. My worst driving shame story is probably from driving with my mother, though. So-- the thing is, I do not like to go fast. I don't like roller skates, I don't like bicycles, I don't like anything that goes above walking speed. When I drove, I liked to go at four miles an hour. With lengthy pauses to catch my breath at every intersection, whether there were any other cars in view or not. (It was rural Iowa; there usually weren't other cars in view.)

So as we approached pretty much every crossroads, my mother would start saying "Don't slow down-- don't slow down!" Every. Crossroads.

So this one time, we got to actually a pretty notoriously bad intersection of two county roads that did have other cars on them. Rather a lot of other cars. And it was signposted "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP."

And I'm approaching the crossroads and starting to slow down, as usual-- I tended to just let the car roll to a stop from inertia, rather than use the brakes, because once I got my foot on the brake pedal I had the hardest time taking it off again-- and my mother gestures to the sign and says, as though I were about to do something wrong, "'Cross traffic does not stop!'"

And I thought about this-- meanwhile, the car is rolling to a gentle halt-- and decided that, when you thought about it, that sign was actually entirely ambiguous. Both traffic streams, after all, crossed each other. I'd assumed 'cross traffic,' was the other stream, but since I was doing something wrong, clearly, I must have made the wrong assumption-- the cross traffic must refer to me!

So I gunned it.

Turns out my first interpretation of the sign was correct.

Also, everyone else on the road that day had really good brakes.

[sanj]

This is why, as much as I love you, I'm not even going to try to teach you to drive.

[ames]

My teenage years are a font of never-ending driving shame stories.

1. Innumerable backings into ditches, both in front of my own house and the houses of my friends.

2. One time, I hit the gas instead of the brake. This is actually kind of impressive, as I was driving a stick shift, and therefore not only managed to hit the wrong pedal, but managed both the gas pedal and the clutch PERFECTLY. So, instead of the embarrassing but ultimately harmless stalling out, I plowed right into the guy in front of me. Said accident happened in my school parking lot, just as everyone was leaving. Said guy was the biggest meanest guy on the football team. He jumped out of his car and slammed the door so hard the car SHOOK, he thundered back to my car (still piteously attached to his at the bumper), he bellowed words that I didn't even know existed, and then yanked my door open - only to see little me, terrified and almost in tears, and not incidentally the recipient of a completely random and somewhat baffling "I hereby swear to protect you from bullies and mean people" oath he'd made the year before. The sheer willpower he showed in restraining himself from pummeling me into the ground was awe-inspiring. He even tried to take the blame when my dad showed up. I wish I had a Great Protector now.

3. Once, I managed to get the car stuck IN THE DRIVEWAY. On one side, my mom's minivan. On the other, the basketball hoop. I don't know how I did it, but I did.

4. In college, I got four tickets in a month, two on one day (speeding and a rear-ender), two on another day two weeks later (a completely unjustified speeding, and no proof of insurance). October 1991 was a bad month for me. The insurance one was dismissed, as I was insured but was just waiting for the card in the mail. The other three resulted in me going to driving school over the summer so I could keep my driver's license.

5. Totally did hit-and-run in a parking lot. Not against a person, but definitely against a very nice BMW. ::hands:: I was a kid. I was terrified.

If I ever have children, they're not getting their license until age 18 AT THE EARLIEST.

[ames]

Oh, and once I got lost driving in a straight line.

[fox]

So having read quite a lot of the comments on LJ and over here, I genuinely don't think I have a driving shame story. I mean:

• backed down my parents' quite steep driveway once and misjudged the angle necessary to avoid denting the driver's-side door of the car parked in front of the neighbors' across the street
  • but my folks have lived in the same house since 1973 and are always after the neighbors not to have their guests park right at the bottom of our driveway
  
  
• miscalculated once in a friend's turny driveway and put a dent in the corner-cap of her dad's aluminum siding
  • and he got a mallet out of his garage and put it right, as this was apparently the sort of thing that happened to his house all the time
  
  
• learned to drive stick at 17 after my trusty first car was totaled in an accident that was absolutely not my fault (I was turning left through a yellow light; crazy old woman was gunning her engine to go straight through the same yellow light, and instead of swerving to the left [eta: her left, b/c she was coming the other way, which I don't think I made clear] to avoid me as I completed my turn, swerved to the right and knocked in my whole front passenger-side corner, which by the way would totally have broken both my brother's legs if he'd been with me, and I still have post-traumatic difficulty with left turns across traffic), and stalled when trying to start up again at a red light
  • sort of thing that happens to everyone, which was no doubt why my mother had insisted that I drive when it became clear about six weeks after the accident that I wasn't going to get back in the car if they didn't make me
  
  
• took the driver's side mirror right off my car once in a tight head-in parking space when I was trying to straighten out and avoid the telephone pole behind me on the right; turned out I completely missed the car parked back-in on my left, but fortunately that guy's driver's side mirror was totally unscathed
  • this was only an issue because it happened to be (a) New Year's Eve and (b) a Friday, so I couldn't even take the car to be looked at until Monday, and they couldn't fix it until Wednesday, so I drove home that night holding the mirror in place with my hand (the casing had snapped, but the cables were fine, so it was that or let it dangle) and spent the next couple of days with the thing duct-taped in place
  
  
• took the bumper 70% off the front of my car backing away from a curb I'd parked too close to because, news flash, the '99 VW Jetta (new body style) has the worst ground clearance ever -- this after no fewer than three occasions (twice when it was me, once when my brother and sister-in-law had it while I was living abroad) in which parking too close to a wheel-stop had caused the plastic grate-thingy to pop out, which pops right back in
  • but I opened the hood and threaded some rope down through the engine block and lashed the bumper to the frame, because it was a Sunday and I had to be able to drive the damn thing between then and when I could get it to the dealer to have the whole bumper replaced

Four different cars in these five different stories, by the way, and really I think only the last one even knocks on the door of shameful -- but not really, because it was really so hard to tell in that car if you were too close to a curb or a wheel-stop until it was too late. The failure of common sense was on the part of the designers, not me, and I note for the record that subsequent years of VW Jettas have had much better clearance, so I am vindicated.

Maybe I'm rationalizing, but I don't think so.

I also don't think I'm rationalizing when I say it was the examiner's fault that I failed maneuverability the first time I took my driving test. Viz: in my state at that time, instead of parallel parking you took this maneuverability test. Everyone was afraid of it. There were five orange cones in a parking-space-sized rectangle with a point about a car-length out front in the center. We were to pull in to the rectangle, turn in one or the other direction as directed by the examiner, straighten out next to the cone out front, and then do the whole thing in reverse and end up where we started. You could change direction only once; extra jiggering would cost you I think five points per direction-change. Any part of the car touching any cone would cost you five points. Knocking a cone over would cost you 26 points, and the pass mark was 75.

I aced my road test and then we headed back to do the maneuverability, and when she said "okay, begin", I wasn't quite lined up properly with the cones. I wouldn't be able to pull straight in, right, I'd have to turn a bit just to get into the rectangle, which would mess up my alignment for turning at the front of the thing. I asked if I could straighten out first, and she said if I wanted to spend the ten points I'd lose for pulling forward and then reversing and shifting into drive again, I could, but she wouldn't recommend it. Well, naturally, it effed up my alignment at the front of the rectangle and I knocked over a blasted cone --

-- any of which could have happened to anyone, and this would all be me rationalizing how the examiner totally had it in for me all those years ago, except for the fact that when she got in the car at the very beginning, before the road test, she said "Oh, Fox. Huh. Does your mother teach at [school where my mother taught]? Yeah, I thought I knew that name. My son was in her class. She told me my son was lazy."

O.o

[melannen]

I failed my first driver's test. The first thing the examiner did was yell at me because one of my tail-lights wasn't regulation. (Dad had fixed it with duct tape, and been pulled over twice for various things in the meantime, and none of the cops had ever said anything about it.) So then she said she'd let me take the test with it this time, but next time, I'd better be in a proper car.

"Next time".

Yeah.

(I failed the second time, too, but I maintain this was the county's fault: we took the test on a closed course, and the the course made a 90-degree turn - just the one road turning, no crossroads or anything - and I failed for not using my turn signal there. Whatever. Apparently they were testing us on knowing what to do on that course, not actual driving-in-traffic ability.)

[shadowvalkyrie]

None that involves me driving badly (fortunately nothing like that ever happened to me *smug*), but still a moment of OMG, NO:

A friend of mine let me drive her car -- before I had my license. We took a trip to town, had a lot of fun, drove back... and got into a traffic jam. So far so good, annoying, but no real problem. We thought. Suddenly, the guy two cars behind us gets out and runs towards us. -- It was her dad...
That was one of the most horrible days of my life, especially because my friend took a whole lot of shit for it for weeks and it was all my fault for pestering her to let me drive. (I'm still shamefully glad my parents never learnt of it, though.)

[ames]

Car running and illicit driving! Here is my story:

My high school best friend Diana was forbidden to allow anyone to drive her behemoth Ford Mercury. She, and only she, was allowed, and her dad was this total scary dock worker from New Jersey who intimidated our entire graduating class. (He's actually a total sweetheart.) The Merc sometimes took a while to actually turn off, even after the key was removed from the ignition.

So, Diana is driving her friend A. home from school, and decides to stop by her boyfriend's house for a quick makeout session. The boyfriend lived down the street from A., so Diana didn't see a problem here. She parked in front of the bf's house, told A to walk home, and met the bf on the porch for some kissing. A disagreed, and instead of walking the three blocks to her house, she slid across the driver's seat of the Merc, which was still running even though there were no keys, popped it into Drive, and stole Diana's car.

A. had never driven a day in her life.

Diana and the bf saw this and chased after them. The bf jumped on the back of the Merc as it slowly rolled down the street, and banged on the rear window, screaming at A. to stop driving. Diana chased after them, but not quite catching up - until ANOTHER car turned onto the street behind them. The new car passed Diana and slowed down a bit. Diana saw the driver's arm move. She thought he was saying "Come on, kid, jump onto my car!" - SO SHE DID.

The poor driver of this new car, who remember is behind a car with a screaming teenager attached to the bumper, and now has his very own screaming teenager attached to HIS bumper, slammed on brakes. Diana fell off the back and was mildly injured (slight concussion, cuts and bruises). The bf, who had heard the new car pull behind and then slam on brakes, jumped off the back of the Merc to see if she was hurt. The driver was freaking out and furious at the teenagers.

A. sedately and slowly parked Diana's car in front of her house, put on the parking brake, went inside, and had a snack before doing her homework.

[rhi]

The first time I drove a car, it was my mother's station wagon, parked at the (very much down-sloping) end of the driveway. I ran over her azaleas because I had no idea that putting the car in reverse would *not* stop it from rolling downhill unless you, you know, hit the gas. And I didn't want to floor the car; this was a curving, downward pointing driveway and if I floored it, I could just see putting the back of the station wagon into the kitchen. (No, I have no idea why they thought this was a good thing for me to learn *first*.)

In short: It's not just you, no.

[ladyvyola]

A fact for which I bear an unholy combination of shame and pride:

I once received a speeding ticket while on my way to the courthouse to pay for a speeding ticket.

Not being a total idiot, I did not inform the ticketing officer of this remarkable coincidence.

[fox]

Dude. Post-graduation road trip, Texas panhandle, flashy lights, pulled over, 81 in a 70, trooper asks where we're headed, we say we're going to the Grand Canyon but that night we're just aiming to get to Santa Rosa, he says that's pretty far, and my friend in the passenger seat says "That's nothing, we started out this morning from Oklahoma City!" We used up all the STFU in the world keeping her quiet while he wrote me a ticket and advised me to stay safe and make sure I got to New Mexico in one piece.

[wyomingnot]

Me and reverse are not good friends. I'm going better with it now.. .kinda have to be with my steep driveway (ain't no way I'm going out head-first. No fucking way).

But back in driver's ed... yeah, they just turned us loose on the range. We had wee Chevy Chevettes (and one Cavalier), all automatics except for the red Chevette. No, I never drove that one. When out on the real road, we had cars equipped with the right hand steering wheel and pedals for the instructor.

The less said about me driving a semi in reverse, the better. (Yes, I went to truck driving school, once upon a time. Finished second in my class in the end. Received a "most improved" award as well. It was only the paperwork and written tests that saved my bacon. I still carry a CDL, though I think I'm going to let it lapse finally)

I've backed into a ditch exactly once. While delivering pizza. Oy.

I've taken out a mailbox.

I managed to total my very first car 25 hours after I bought it. (not my fault! wrong place, wrong time)

I think that driving into a ditch isn't Hall of Shame worthy... unless it's an ongoing problem.

Oh! The day I moved into my second KC apartment, I backed my truck right into the concrete post protecting the hydrant (couldn't *see* it, it was too short and my truck was too tall). I noticed in the weeks after the incident that an awful high percentage of the cars in that parking lot had similiar dents. (and I quit parking anywhere near those posts)

:)

[cimorene]

Uhmmmm. Well, there was the time that I was driving my sister and exchange student and me to school and my sister was (literally) screaming behind my head as I pulled out of the driveway and I made an over-wide loop across the street and knocked over the mailbox of our katty-corner neighbor. Even though we live across the street so it's not like we could really run away, and I immediately stopped, the owner of the house came rushing out acting all suspicious that we were trying to hit and run because I then craned around the seat to yell at my sister (I guess she'd've been 8 at the time) to pipe the hell down, which caused about a 30-second delay in emerging from the car. Then, because she was a freak, we had to wait for the police to arrive and were very late to school.

Oooorrrr there was that time that my mom was yelling at me and I ran a red light while yelling back. Or the time I was yelling at my mom and SHE ran a red light while yelling back. Or the time my mom was yelling at me and I ALMOST ran a red light from distraction (this happened a lot, but this particular instance was a very close call) and I interrupted to tell her to stop yelling because I couldn't drive and she just yelled louder so I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the street.

[cimorene]

OH and the time I burned the ENTIRE emergency brake pads off by driving about 10 minutes on the way home from church with them on. Finally we were all like, "Is that smell from US?" To be fair, both parents were in the car at the time.

[copracat]

Sooo, the instructor didn't bother to ask, How many of you have driven a car before?

Fault located! What an idiot. Who made him an instructor?

I wonder if they learned their lesson and started reviewing the class before they put them in cars?

[pollyanna]

I didn't learn to drive until I was in my thirties and reverse never came easily to me. However eventually I passed, and although I don't own a car I hire one when I need to go a long distance.

So one time soon after passing the test I drive for five hours to my parent's house in Cornwall. Having arrived I do about a 15 point turn in the narrow road in front of them so I can reverse into the parking space. Didn't quite get the angle right so I reversed into the drive and continued on into the sunken garden. Imagine, if you will, a small scale version of the last scene in The Italian Job.

Luckily my sister's SO is a heavy goods vehicle engineer, so he turned up with the kind of jack you use to raise articulated lorries, and with some dexterity manoeuvred me back onto the drive.

And you know why my family is so wonderful? They have never mentioned this since :-)

[fox]

Man, but this is bringing back memories. I taught my brother to drive (all four of us having decided this would be one of the long-term benefits -- for everyone -- of my parents' having taught me) and therefore he trusted me quite sweetly, as for example the time when I was home from college, my folks were out, and the kid came home from something and called up to me to ask if I knew whether getting a dent out of the passenger-side door counted as body work and would therefore likely be quite expensive. (It wasn't his fault -- someone had dinged it in the parking lot, he said, and I believed him, because he's not shifty and I'm not his mother -- so he was concerned but not guilty.) I taught that boy everything he knows about how to get a dent out of a car door with a plunger. [nostalgic snif]

[derryderrydown]

I've taken my driving test five times and have yet to come close to passing.

I've kind of accepted that I'm not meant to be behind the wheel of a car.

(Strangely, I'm quite good at off-road driving, where it's just me and the car. It's when you throw in all the other lunatics on the road and I have to guess what they're going to do that I fall to pieces.)

ETA: And driving tests are rather expensive in this country. First you take the theory test, which is £31, and then the practical, which is £75. And driving tuition is around £20/hr.

Further ETA: I keep reading other people's stories and being reminded of my own. The very first time I drove a car was my father's ancient Lincoln towncar thingie. With a boat on a trailer attached to the back. That I was attempting to tow out of the water. Up a 35-degree ramp. Covered in wet seaweed.

The car (and boat) very, very slowly slid backwards - despite the fact that the wheels were going very, very quickly forwards - and ended up in the sea, while my father yelled at me for not being able to drive.

Thankfully, some nice men with a vehicle that was actually designed for this kind of thing pulled me out. But only after they'd pulled off the car's bumper.

Oh, and the boat was misplaced on the trailer cradle, so we had to refloat it and then do the whole thing again.

The next time we took that boat out, it exploded and sank and we had to swim for the nearest bit of land - which turned out to be Sean Connery's back garden.

[msilverstar]

I think you win at transport fail, what with that last sentence!

[haunted]

Not really a shame story, really, more a how-the-hell-did-I-not-kill-people story. My first driving instructor was a little old man who had apparently taught half my town to drive. He was very nice, if a bit doddery and shaky. On my very first lesson he drove me to a clear stretch of road, swapped seats with me, and said "Go for it!". That was fine, trial and (mostly) error, whatever. I had a dozen lesson, then stopped driving altogether for about a year.

So along comes my next instructor. I tell him I've had a bunch of lesson, so he lets me in the driver's seat right away and off we go.

"So, can you explain to me now the breaks system in a car works?"

"Haha, what? No."

"Uh, okay. How about the gears?"

"Well, you need different gears for different speeds and hills and stuff. You probably need to remind me when to change them, by the way."

"...right. Do you know how to change the oil and water and brake fluid?"

"Not a clue."

"I see. What about maneuvers?

"Which ones?"

"Three-point turns? Parallel parking? Hill starts?"

"They sound like fun! Should I turn here, by the way?"

"No, no, I think we need to pull in and have a chat."

Turns out my dozen 45-minute lessons with the old guy had taught me, basically, how to drive in straight lines and around gentle corners, in gears 1 to 3. No material needed for the written test was ever covered, really. I could have been driving a go-cart for all the technically know-how I had.

[marginaliana]

The first night I had my car I left the lights on and killed the battery, requiring a trip from AAA in the morning (and I was late for work my first week on the job)!

When I took drivers ed, the story that the instructor told year after year involved being on a driving test and having a deer jump through the windshield (apparently the girl driving at the time passed the test!).

[jadelennox]

I was sixteen, and my parents were out of town, and my boyfriend was NOT supposed to be spending the night. So I drove out of the convenience store parking lot with my boyfriend in the passenger seat, and didn't pull far enough into the street, and hit a parked pickup at about 2 MPH. Knocked the unharmed truck onto the sidewalk while my mum's Toyota Corolla folded up like the tinfoil accordion it was, defying space-time and becoming a sort of Toyota Klein bottle.

The next day I informed my BFF, who had a massive crush on me and could be trusted to lie for me, that he'd spent the night at my house and had been with me when I totalled Mum's car. Because I was a heartless bitch, apparently.

[callmesandyk]

I actually don't drive anymore (by which I mean the last 8 years) because I'm the kind of driver who gets other people in accidents.

And also, I was so YOU when taking drivers' ed. I had never driven. Except there was an instructor in the car and they yelled at me for not knowing how to drive already.