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

[brooklinegirl.livejournal.com]

I completely totaled my first car a month after I got it, as I was trying to cross two lanes of traffic (one going in each direction) by just kind of - closing my eyes and gunning it and hoping people would stop. HAND TO GOD: that was how my mother TAUGHT me to drive through that intersection.

and last fall, I drove my car into the side of my house. Not into the various and sundry pipes sticking out on either side, which make pulling in and out of it a hazard, but the part where I had to REALLY REALLY TRY to get close enough to just - drive into the house. I've been trying to figure out how I actually managed to do it ever since, and CAN'T. I had to have been REALLY TRYING.

/o\

[brooklinegirl.livejournal.com]

OH. also, in the city where I GREW UP, and LEARNED TO DRIVE, I was trying to get to my mom's house, got confused, and DROVE UP AN ON-RAMP IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. that was fun. It was in the afternoon and only one car was coming towards me and I, you know, swerved, but OH MY GOD YEAH THAT WAS A GOOD TIME.

[penknife.livejournal.com]

I do not have any idea how to parallel park. At all. It might as well involve landing a spaceship on the moons of Saturn.

I passed a driver's test that included parallel parking by turning the wheel at totally random angles and somehow winding up inside the orange cones, at which point I was totally relieved that I never had to do that again. Sometimes I am looking for a parking space, and there are all these street parking spaces that would probably do me a lot of good if my car suddenly developed the ability to go sideways, and ...

... well. I also have two stories about car wrecks involving me making left turns without looking where I was going, but somehow the parallel parking thing is what makes me doubt whether I really have this "competent adult" thing down.

[dine.livejournal.com]

oh, thank god I'm not the only one! I can only assume that the DMV tester wasn't paying attention, as I got my license at age 17, somehow passing even the parallel-parking bit. maybe he just didn't think it was important - which, points to him, cause I'm 50 now, and *still* can't parallel-park.

like you, I end up passing by lots and lots of perfectly fine spaces that I can't get into - which includes lots of cursing, generally.

[anoel.livejournal.com]

Oh god, once I accidentally drove into the wrong one way lane coming into the mall section...thankfully there was no cars coming or it'd be scary. And then once I was stopping for a traffic light, reached over to get something from the other seat and let my foot off the brake...hit someones car but thankfully, thankfully there was no damage so there was no need to get insurance or anything.

Also I somehow managed to pass my road test with only one morning of parallel parking practice...

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

I'm astonished at all of you people who actually had to parallel park on your road tests. My state, we just had to turn right four times. (And I still managed to fail once, through nervousness.)

[jarrow.livejournal.com]

Oh ho ho. You feel shame for driving into a ditch going backward? Let me tell you a little story, TFV.

In 2004 I had a paper route. I had to drive 90 miles through the middle-of-nowhere backwoods of rural Indiana 7 nights a week from about 2-6 AM. (It took anywhere from 2-4 hours depending on various factors.) This was after completing a 10-hour fast food management shift. So, I was tired. Constantly.

One night in the middle of my route I was approaching the tiny bridge. (You see where this is going, but whatever, I'M TELLING YOU ANYWAY.) By "bridge" I simply mean a tiny piece of road, no rails or anything. It was maybe 5 feet long and 5 feet high, crossing over a ditch. I'd gone over it two hundred times day after day. I could do this route with my eyes closed. (Well, at some point every night I inevitable did - fall asleep, that is.) But anyway. This one night I managed to overshoot the turn completely and somehow aim my car to the left of the bridge, thereby going straight into the ditch. I still don't know how it happened. Maybe my tired eyes confused the black of the bridge asphault and the black empty space next to it? I don't know. But I managed to stick my car parallel to the ground about 4 feet in the air in this frickin ditch. I got towed at 4 AM, it was horrible, I had nightmares about it continuously thereafter.

Fast forward three weeks!

My mother is visiting and wants to go on the route with me. Great! So she does. She'd heard my stories about seeing a dozen deer every night and wacky ditch shenanigans, and she still came along for the ride, confident that all would be fine. AND I DID IT AGAIN. WITH MY MOTHER IN THE CAR WATCHING AS IT HAPPENED.

At least I had company this time while waiting the 1.5 hours for the tow truck? \o?

My ditch shame, let me show you it.

[brooklinegirl.livejournal.com]

AND I DID IT AGAIN. WITH MY MOTHER IN THE CAR WATCHING AS IT HAPPENED.

...I love you. SO MUCH.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

After looking at the other comments --

I'd forgotten that my current car had quite a large dent in the rear bumper, because I backed, with great vigor, into a stone planter in a parking lot somewhere.

My father, who at that point had been driving for something like forty years, tried to back the same Skylark out of the yard with the driver's door (for some reason) a little open, and tore the door off. (Luckily all that was really messed up were the hinges, so we fixed it without too much trouble.)

My mother. My mother once had been in the hospital for three days following a heart attack when her husband called us to ask why we weren't visiting her. We had no idea. She hadn't bothered to tell us. (When we rushed into the room shortly after, she said, in genuine puzzlement, that she didn't understand why we were there. It was just a heart attack, and it was all over.) We remonstrated.

A couple of years later, she called one evening and said "I'm fine, and it was nothing, but you people yell at me if I don't tell you things, and everything's all right now, but I sort of ran myself over".

And, as a capper, my old office-mate was waiting for a ferry somewhere in England, while on vacation, and turned around to find that her car was now in the North Sea. She hadn't quite set the brake.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

my old office-mate was waiting for a ferry somewhere in England, while on vacation, and turned around to find that her car was now in the North Sea.


...That's a priceless one.

[ladysorka]

At my last apartment complex, my assigned parking spot was between two rather narrow pillars, so I misjudged and managed to take my driver's side mirror off.

Twice.

[stillane.livejournal.com]

I was in college, home for the summer at my parents' house, and working in the city by day. This meant a pretty good commute every morning, which meant I had to be up at a time that I still consider inhuman in order to make it in to work on time. The last bit of the trip into the city is this big bridge, right, with a stoplight at the end. So, I'm cruising along, and the light turns red, and like a good citizen, I stop...

Next thing I know, I'm waking up from a full sleep when my front bumper kisses the back of the Lexus in front of me and the angry guy in a suit driving it gets in my face through the window. I'm freaking out, babbling, trying to explain that I just fell asleep, and he's very, very pissed. Lucky for me, the car in front of him was a police cruiser, and the officers jumped out and took one look at the utter lack of any damage and told the guy to take a hike. I drove the two blocks to work, squeezed into a parking spot, and sobbed my eyes out. Then I went in, and never said a word to anyone about it.

Me? Internalize much? Nah.

[ninasis.livejournal.com]

When I was 18, I took my parents' minivan and loaded up my little brothers (then 5 and 6) and went to the mall. When I stopped for gas, I totally spazzed and didn't see the big, bright neon yellow pole that was placed in front of the pumps. You know the ones...they're there to stop idiots like me from slamming into the pumps themselves and causing a movie-epic explosion.

Anyway, I scraped the side of the van along that bright, yellow pole from the end of the driver's door to the gas tank. I had to bribe my brothers not to say anything. Ended up spending my entire paycheck on video games at the mall, shoes for both of them, and lunch somewhere. Went home and told my parents that someone must have hit us when we were inside the mall and the car was parked, because the van was FINE when we left it and all scraped up when we got back.

For almost 10 years I thought I'd gotten away with this. Then one day my parents are visiting my great-grandmother, and my mom starts telling the story of my many slips and falls and accidents, both to my person and various vehicles and whatnot, and tells the story about the van. And my dad busts out laughing, because it turns out that my 6 yo brother totally narked on me a few days after the incident, and told my dad what really happened. Only he never told my mom. So a DECADE later I get a phone call from my mother, pissed that I'd lied to her TEN YEARS earlier.

I will admit that I ended up having a couple of more run-ins with those gas station poles. They are my motor vehicle nemeses.

[holli.livejournal.com]

I scraped one of those suckers the very first time I pumped gas on my own! Not my most shining moment; I believe I also forgot to close the gas cap and had to hop out of the car, engine still running, and close it before I finally pulled out of the gas station.

[featherlane.livejournal.com]

See, I took driver's ed like two years ago, and these days they don't even train you in a car (though this might not be the case outside of large cities, I don't know), you just get a test and a permit. So I had to get my mother to teach me. My mother, who on multiple occasions during my childhood forgot to put on the parking brake, once resulting in my (then-toddler) sister and I rolling down a parking lot into a busy street, only saved when two men at the bottom of the hill caught the car. My mother, who, when moving me into my dorm, got distracted and ran a red light through a busy intersection, resulting in another driver slamming into the passenger side (where I was sitting), and totaling the rental car. My mother, who recently did 80 miles an hour on the highway while arguing with the dental receptionist on her cell phone (we were late for an appointment). I can't even drive with her anymore without compulsively saying, "Watch out for the pedestrian! Red light! Please slow down! Pedestrian! Guard rail! WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE." She's not a bad mother, just a bad driver, and she especially hates having to sit in the passenger seat.

Anyway, the point of the story: the first time she takes me out to try and teach me, we're approaching an intersection, and she's trying to explain the intricacies of the three-point turn. My timing is off, she's trying to correct me, I'm driving too close to the parked cars, and suddenly we're having an argument and I'm crying hysterically and the car is parked horizontally across the intersection blocking traffic in both directions. We switched places, drove home, and never spoke of it again.

My dad ended up teaching me to drive. I passed my test, eventually, but I never drive anywhere, because I feel in my bones that if I do, SOMEONE WILL END UP DEAD. I ride my bike.

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

The only time my driver's ed teacher woke up was when a I ran a stop sign.

As for backing up - my dad insists on backing into the garage, so before I learned how to go forwards, I learned how to turn the car around in the street to back up the curved driveway (not hitting the mailbox, basketball pole, flower bed, or fence) and into the narrow garage between the table and the minivan. I was surprisingly good at this fairly quickly. Until my 16th birthday (I got my license the next day) when I scratched the front of the car on the garage door on my way in.

Though my most embarrassing was driving for about 3 miles (including past TWO cop cars) without full lights late at night because my friend's driveway was so brightly lit I hadn't realized only my running lights were on.

That, and while I was working for the government, having my "license to drive the government vehicles" taken away because someone hit my pickup while I was parked at a Sonic. I literally fell out of the car laughing so hard when my boss told me I couldn't drive until the accident got processed.

[dzurlady.livejournal.com]

I have forgotten to turn my lights on so many times it's not funny. On well lit roads it's easy not to notice.

[park-hye-in.livejournal.com]

oh, god. shortly after i got my license, i got in a fight with my parents at a restaurant and i stormed out in a typical fit of teenage rage. i jumped in the car (we were on a trip somewhere so there was only the one car) and decided to blow off steam by going back to the mall we had just been at. the mall was visible from the restaurant. somehow, in the tenth of a mile between the restaurant and the mall, i managed to get on the interstate. as soon as i realized what happened, i pulled off to the side of the road, hyperventilated, looked around, actually considered driving back up the ramp, decided that was a bad idea even for me, and continued to freak out. i got back on the road, drove aimlessly for a while (16-year-old me was apparently not clear on how highways worked), got off at a random exit and decided to try to find my way back, despite the fact that i was completely unfamiliar with the area. i ended up in town made up entirely of one-way streets...needless to say i drove the wrong way down most of them and got honked at by many, many cars. also it was the middle of winter and i was sliding all over the road and driving through snowbanks.

in the end, the only business that had a light on that late (this was a very small town in northern new york) was a law office with a cleaning lady inside. she was elderly. she was vacuuming. she had headphones on. i stood outside in the freezing cold without a coat (coat had been left in restaurant, of course) and pounded on the door for like ten minutes before she noticed me and opened the door. then she almost didn't let me in! i had to plead with her to let me use the phone. finally i got into the office, opened the phone book, and realized i didn't know the name of the restaurant. i had to call information and describe what i remembered about the place, and somehow, they hooked me up. i talked to my parents and they managed to give me directions back to the restaurant. they thought it was absolutely hilarious. that is, until they saw the dents i had put in the car door (from the icy snowbanks! and, possibly, a tree branch).

that trip was the reason why 1) we got cell phones, and 2) i live in a place where i never have to drive.

ahahaha, wait a second! i suddenly remembered another terrible instance that i had completely forgotten about, similar to yours but with less public humiliation. i backed out of our driveway and went all the way across the street into a ditch on the other side, taking out our mailbox on the way. my dad, who had been waiting to close the garage door, ran frantically down the driveway waving his arms to no avail. we had to call triple a.

i think the main reason i'm so scared of driving is that i'm sure there are others like me out there. *shudder*

[park-hye-in.livejournal.com]

okay, now that i have read through the other comments: THIS POST IS AMAZING. we're all so gleeful about being so terrible!

[shrieking-ell.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are many. I shall give you 2 from my high school days (why are the driver's ed ones always so much funnier than the others?)

Driver's Ed what not to do example 1:

Do not under any circumstances go the wrong way down the only one way street in town if you value your reputation at all.

Driver's Ed what not to do example 2:

Do not wear your incredibly cool ass-kicker Doc Martens to drivers ed. Especially if you have big feet. Your boots will be too big to successfully fit between the gas and brake pedals. Every time you try to go forward, your boot will catch that rod that goes from your brake pedal to the driver's ed instructor's pedal on the right side. Instead of forward motion, you will give everyone in the car whiplash. Repeatedly.

Yay, I got my license! I can drive to school now!

In my first standard shift car. Which I will then proceed to stall, repeatedly, at the stoplight on the hill *right in front of the high school* as then entire student body and all the faculty look on in ever-increasing amusement. Until the car rolls backwards into the car behind me. Whose driver is also dissolving in fits of tears of laughter. Did I mention that it was a Gremlin I was driving?

In conclusion - I'd offer people rides and they'd turn me down in order to escape to the safety of the school bus.

ILU

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

Doc Martens to drivers ed. Especially if you have big feet.

Aaaand that's where I figured out what was going to happen. Only in my case, they were really really cool platform pvc vinyl boots, with laces that went all the way up. I had to pull over and take them off and then drive with my right foot bare, because otherwise I wasn't going to be able to actually survive the drive to the club.

So I get there and have to lace my boot (just the one! Automatic transmission ftw.) back on, in full view of everyone and lemme tell you, the boots were kickass, the miniskirt was hot, and flashing the hole-filled athletic tube sock can only have added to my general coolness. Right? Right?

And then there was the Twelth Night with the skirt with a homemade mostly inflexible hoop. I can drive in a hoop skirt. Not well, mind you, or for any great length of time, but the hoop slid under my feet at one edge and was riiiiight at the top edge of the steering wheel at the other, so it rested against my nose if I stretched my neck up and I could turn the wheel in 15 degree increments. I just took off the petticoat in the parking lot when it was time to drive home, since I didn't care so much by then.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

...Okay. I've got a better story, but it's not one I was driving for, so I was a little leery of sharing it at first. However, it's a pretty hilarious story, so I might as well. I just won't link the person whose car it was to this post. ;) The important thing you must remember is that THIS IS TRUE. I am not making it up. Sometimes people think it is not true. I can't say that I blame them.

I went to school in a rural area where you would get your driver's license right at 16 or risk never getting to go anywhere again. One of my friends had a tiny little car, an old Toyota Corona, which was small enough that we thought it would be a great April Fool's joke to put a little wind-up wheel on the top of it. Anyway, when one of our friends was a bit behind the rest of us getting a license, we thought we would teach him to drive. For some reason that has since become incomprehensible, it seemed like a really good idea to combine this teaching with a road trip. To the mountains. With little narrow winding mountain roads.

So up we went in my friend's tiny little car, and learner!friend was driving along one of the aforementioned windy mountain roads. On one side--a cliff face! On the other side--a cliff! Whatever miscalculation he made, it was a fairly important one, because my memory of this day begins with the part where my idiot friend DROVE OFF A CLIFF and I was pretty sure we were all gonna die.

We didn't die. We didn't die because there was a tiny little tree jutting out from part of the cliff, and caught our tiny little car. You thought this only happened in movies; previous to this day so did I. We paused. We breathed. We wondered if breathing was bad, and likely to push us over the edge. Praying for our lives, we gingerly climbed out of the car and made our way back up the cliff to the road, where we sat on the shoulder, looking down at our car on the tiny little tree and letting out occasional gasps of hysterical laughter, because this JUST DOES NOT HAPPEN.

Eventually a truck came by, and stopped upon seeing us. Out of the truck came two very big, very butch, flannel-clad lumberjack-mountaineer sort of men. One of them asked, "Got a problem?"

We pointed to our car, stuck on a tree halfway down the cliff. The lumberjacks whistled. They were clearly impressed, but not with our driving.

One of these big burly men turned to the other and said, "Sweetheart, we've got to help these kids. Is the tow rope in the truck?"

The second big burly man shook his head. "I think it's back at your mom's house, darling, but we can go get it."

They invited us to come with them in search of a tow rope. Finding this whole thing rather surreal and having no real choice besides 'sit there on the mountain indefinitely', we went along. They took us back to where they lived with Darling's mother (I think they were actually called Steve and Dan, but I can't remember if my brain made that up to go with the pet names or not), a lovely little old mountain lady who made us tea and fed us cookies while the guys dug a winch and chains out of the garage. Then they drove us back, and somehow we got the chains hooked up to the car, and their big huge farmer truck pulled our tiny little car back up onto the road. We went home and went to bed.

[featherlane.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure you win.

("Sweetheart." Holy God.)

[shinealightonme]

Mine's not quite so traumatic as yours; I think, had that happened to me, I would never have driven again. I'm not good with getting back on the metaphorical horse.

When my mother went through her midlife crisis, she rediscovered an apparently life-long love of classic Mustangs, which in turn rekindled an apparently life-long love of driving manual transmission cars, and the firm belief that if her daughters didn't know how to drive manual transmission cars, well, she had somehow failed as a parent. So my parents purchased a horribly beat-up 1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle for my sister and I to practice on.

A few lessons with the Super Bug went off all right, minus stalling at every single stop sign and having to put up with the loud, loud, loud noises the engine on that thing makes, but my parents never actually committed much time to driving with me. So the night that it was suggested that I drive the car to the gas station, I had really only had an hour or two of experience driving stick shift, and only on residential streets. I did manage to make it to the street the gas station was on - a two-lane road with a 45 mph speed limit - but that was it. Somehow, when I was on that street in first gear, I reached down to shift to second and...there was nothing. Whatsoever. The engine made the most unpleasant noises I have ever heard in my life, I could not find second gear, and I was stuck at 15 mph, getting passed, yelled at by my co-pilot, honked at, and nearly run over by a huge truck, until we finally crawled into the gas station where I burst into tears, ran out of the car, and vowed never to drive stick shift again. And I haven't, since.

(I also know someone who's crashed her car more times than she'll even admit, including driving into a fence, a lamppost, and backing up into her own gate because she forgot to look behind her before leaving the driveway. If that helps)

[eledhwenlin]

My father once backed up into our garage. To be fair, we don't have an even level access to our garage (it's about 1.5m under the street level). Still. He totally wrecked the garage door, my mother couldn't get her car out and had to drive him to work first and then go to her own workplace.

I. Okay, I will tell you this, since this is pretty anonymous, but I managed to fail my practical driving test four times. (In Germany, you need to take 14 lessons of theoretical stuff and then do the theoretical exam. You also need to get a certain number of driving lessons (4 motorway, 4 in rural areas and 2 or four at night) before you can do the practical exam.) That is my pathetic driving-related story. In the six years I've had my license I did not have any accidents (we don't count that one time I hit a post, do we). I think the 1000 euros I paid ONLY for the practical exams (the rest of my driving education was about 1500, I think; it's pretty expensive here in Germany) even the field out, though.

[sundancekid.livejournal.com]

So my second car, the one I drove my senior year of high school, did not have A/C. (The first one hadn't either.) And the headliner fabric was mostly gone, so I always drove with the sunroof open, both for cooling purposes, and for the purpose of not getting covered in orange dust.

I was on my way home from a friend's graduation party, where we'd each been given a helium balloon, which I'd tied to my purse. Which I'd then put in the front seat.

Of course my purse started to fly away. As I'm grabbing for it, attempting to keep it in the car, I turned the wheel right as I reached. I totally jumped the curb and ran right into someone's rose bush. To get back onto the street, I had to go through the rest of their rose bush. I totally killed the entire thing, but I was too embarrassed to stop and say anything, so I just drove home.

[hyrkanian.livejournal.com]

I once backed up into a brand new, still had dealer tags, Jaguar. :( Owned by a fellow boarder at a saddle club, so I had to see her every day as long as I kept my horses there. :( I can't explain it, I looked but didn't see it. My only excuse is it was dark and the car was dark green. That cost me $500 to cover her deductible because my husband at the time spent the insurance premium money on other things without telling me so until we scrounged up the money for a new policy, I had to drive uninsured. :(

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

When I was 17 or so our car wouldn't start. It needed to be push-started (it's a manual as are all cars in South Africa - I don't know if you can do this with those automatic things you have over there). Only my Mum and I were home and I managed to convince her to let me sit in the drivers seat while she pushed the car backwards down the driveway (we couldn't turn it) and do the important bit of turning the key and revving the engine. All went as planned until the engine actually caught at which point I was supposed to put the car into neutral and put on the brakes. What I actually did was slam my foot down on the pedal next to the brake which of course was the accelerator, while forgetting to put in the clutch and change the gear. Meaning that the car shot backwards. Did I mention it was a two door vehicle (one leaned the front seats forward to allow passengers into the back seat) so the doors were extra long? Did I mention that the door was open because my Mum was using it to push?

Cutting a long story short, the car shot backwards, being in reverse. My mum leapt for her life into the ornamental palm near the gate. The car went through the gate. The door did not, because it collided with the gate post and skittered across the driveway with a screech of tortured metal.

I did hit the brake then, but too late. My Mum had what we might call a bit of a sense of humour failure at this point and I ran indoors and locked myself in the study and phone my aunt to tell her to come and rescue me before my Dad got home because I was genuinely worried he might kill me. ;)

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

Oh! And did I mention when I went to Seattle? In our country we drive on the left. There you do not. On my second day there, still jetlagged and driving an automatic oldsmobile for the first time in my life, I was coming back from dropping my boyfriend off at his new job at Microsoft. I stopped at a stop street. And then, when it was time to go, I turned right and onto the left hand side of the road, at which point I found myself going the wrong way down a 5-lane highway into a stream of angry American traffic, with a 3 foot high concrete island preventing me from getting back onto the correct side of the road. I had to weave through said angry traffic until there was a place to pull off, at which point I was sweating and shaking too much to hold the wheel and had to get out.

[ratcreature]

I had to take the driving test three times before I passed, and it took far more lessons than most other people I knew. Considering how expensive each hour with an instructor is it cost my parents a fortune. (I think they may have some reforms since then allowing parents to supervise their kids, but back then you couldn't learn with your parents in traffic, you were only allowed to practice with a certified instructor in a car fitted so that the teacher can control the car.)

The second time I failed the test it was because I didn't overtake a truck on the highway. I thought going slow was okay, I mean, I was still over the minimum speed for the road, and quite content to stay behind the truck, but apparently I needed to show my proficiency in overtaking someone and also was supposed to drive the recommended speed of 130km/h if at all possible. Still it was better than the first test which I failed because I nearly ran over a cyclist when I was turning whom I had somehow overlooked, causing the instructor to intervene. The most embarrassing thing in lessons was that I have this habit of confusing left and right, causing me to initiate dangerous maneuvers in the opposite direction from what the instructor wanted. Also embarrassing was to stall the car on busy intersections, when I had trouble with the manual transmission and the clutch once again.

Also so many of the lessons sucked just on general principle (especially the night time driving lesson, the lessons in rain, fog and snow, really all the special conditions lessons). Though they taught me to never try to drive on icy roads or in snow without a professional next to me, I guess. In general I think they require so many lessons here to give you at least a chance to survive the traffic.

I don't own a car now, and find driving extremely stressful. Though it was okay when I did it on vacation in the US years ago. Somehow your drivers were all much more relaxed than here, and less aggressive and more tolerant, even in the cities, and highway traffic was relaxing because it was slow, no sudden appearances of cars going faster than 250km/h because you happen to drive on stretch without speed limit were they feel they need to race their death machines, while you travel leisurely at 130km/h as is recommended. And then if you don't get out of the way quickly enough they'll crowd you etc. I mostly liked driving in the US even though it caused me bad anxiety here.

[vass]

Wow. In most parts of Australia you're not allowed to drive faster than 100kph. In built-up areas it's 50kph. 40 in a school zone.

[hjcallipygian.livejournal.com]

My brother isn't just a bad driver (which he is, and which he will admit to), but he's also one of the most bizarrely unlucky drivers ever. He now lives in a major metropolitan area where he almost always takes public transit, and that's a deliberate lifestyle choice on his part in order to reduce the amount of time he sits behind a steering wheel.

My brother has not only hit several mailboxes, gotten in several accidents, and accidentally run his Honda Accord off of a farm driveway, but he was hit by a bicyclist. No, I didn't get that wrong -- he was leaving his apartment complex during college, pulled forward to the edge of the street, sat there for a good five seconds waiting for an opening in traffic, and then some kid on a bicycle just plowed into his car and went flying across his hood. The bike dented his car's quarter panel. The kid got up, ran to his bike, yelled out, "I'm late to an exam!" and jumped on and kept riding.

car hit by cyclist.

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

I was a passenger when my mom was hit by a jogger.

Mom was stopped, not creeping, completely and totally stopped, at a red light as pedestrians crossed and this person was looking down, fooling with her Walkman (just dated myself there, whoops), and ran - *thunk!* into the side of the car. We looked at her, she mouthed something angrily at us, and she jogged away.

She didn't do as much damage as the deer that ran into the same car. Mom was moving slowly because deer tended to run in the area, and he ran into the fender, she hit the brakes, then he darted in front of her across the road while she flailed at the wheel and the windsheild a bit. He left a dent.

[ldthomps.livejournal.com]

I don't have any really good stories of my own, remarkably. But one of my friends used to work at Borders and told the story of how one day a Lincoln Continental with a young woman on a learner's permit and her dad ended up in the Self Help section. Through the window. She'd mistaken the gas for the brake and just popped right up on over the curb, etc.

No one was hurt... except the car, building, and several shelves of self help books.

[hyrkanian.livejournal.com]

You just reminded me of another story. Same ex husband as mentioned in my earlier comment insisted that the barely-existent brakes on our car were fine, and I was being an idiot for wanting to get them replaced. We pulled up at a Kinko's and I parked in a spot right in front of the store, except I didn't park, I kept moving. Right into the huge glass window that was the front of the store. Luckily the brakes had worked enough to slow me down to a very slow crawl so the car only bounced gently off the glass and rolled backward to come to a stop perfectly parked. The store manager ran out and asked if we were okay, and that was all the repercussions that ensued. Except that I couldn't stop crying hysterically for the entire hour that the ex spent in the store, so I sat in the car. I also walked home because the ex insisted it was a fluke and the brakes would work fine if I just drove home (he didn't have a license). No way in hell was I taking that car through traffic so I walked the 2 miles home. Ex drove the car home and yes, it stopped just fine. :/

[bearfairie.livejournal.com]

Oooh driving shame stories. This one isn't shame so much as sheer comedy. My drivers ed instructor was a professional unicyclist and part time circus clown. I'm completely serious. And he'd tell us circus stories while we were trying to learn to drive. And somehow he managed to be the single most boring human being alive. ever. And didn't really teach us to drive. I nearly killed us all when a squirrel ran into the street and I discovered what brakes were for. And b/c he didn't actually teach us, I failed my first road test since the whole concept of turning left at an intersection wasn't so solid for me... After that I made a friend of mine who was 2 yrs older teach me to drive (my father, bless his heart, tried but I'd make a mistake and he'd bellow "IF THERE WERE PEOPLE THERE YOU WOULD HAVE JUST KILLED 8 PEOPLE" or something equally useful.

aaah driving.

[midnightbex.livejournal.com]

Came off friendsfriends to read the driving woes and now feel I should probably share my own driving shame. There's a bit of it.

My first driving incident happened when I was 18 in my very own boat of a car. I'd gone out to lunch with my mom and sister and then walked out to the parking lot with both of them. I got into my car and proceeded to back it directly into a light pole that I swear to this day did not exist until I hit it. My mom and sister, who were standing in the parking lot talking, insist it did and the incident still comes up in arguments my sister and I get into about who is the worse driver. (Mind you, she managed to take out the railing in front of our parents' house while backing out of the opposite side of the driveway which we still can't figure out the logistics of and at one point hit a tree while parallel parking on a city street.)

About a year ago I had just gotten a new kitten and was taking her to the vet. She was sick and didn't like the cat carrier or the car and so was fussing. It was also much earlier in the morning than I'm usually awake and I got distracted. As a direct result I missed the guy in front of me stopping suddenly so I didn't get the brake slammed in time to stop fully and tapped him. We pulled over and I start bawling and apologizing and bawling. There wasn't any damage and he was really great about it, but I never told anyone until just now.

That's not the worst one though, by a long shot. A couple years ago I took a road trip out the Tulsa with a friend of mine. I'd been driving for about 10 hours and it was well into the a.m. when we hit some construction on the tollway stretch just inside the Oklahoma border. The road wasn't lit and the cones were confusingly placed with just the right amount of space between that I drove straight through them without noticing until I hit gravel. The car behind me stopped so I could swerve back on but it was the single most frightening car incident of my life. To top it off my friend was passed out in the passenger seat and didn't wake up at all, so I just never told her about how we almost ended up in a pit in the middle of the Oklahoma tollway.

[macey-muse.livejournal.com]

My mum once drove into a three-foot-tall concrete pillar. Forwards. Which I thought was fairly impressive, considering it was obviously right there and yet...

Myself, I - well, I've been saying I have a man's brain for years. Spatial perception rock on! comforting people not-so-much. I love parallel parking and reverse parking, but if you offered me £50 to park forwards into a row of bay parking with cars either sides of the space, I - no. Just, no. See, I spent /hours/ learning reverse park, parallel park, reverse round corner & three-point turn (the four compulsary manouvres on British driving tests). But no one ever bothered to teach me how to forward park, so, now I can't ^.^'

The one time I tried, I, mayhavecomeawaywithredpaintonthesilvercar ^.^' and very carefully did not respond when mother queried this a week later XD whoops.

[dine.livejournal.com]

there are a few instances of sheer wtf stupidity lurking in my driving history (not counting my complete inability to parallel-park, which is mostly inconvenient).

my folks had me practice in large empty parking lots (community college, etc.), to get used to the physical part of driving - and then took us out to country roads with little traffic for some 'real' hands-on experience. dad made me nervous, so mom ended up my copilot most often, which meant I picked up some of her habits, which I've tried hard to overcome (it's freaking scary driving with her)

in college, I "borrowed" dad's car to go to a party out in the country - of *course* I had a bit to drink, and very very carefully drove home, panicking the whole way that I'd be pulled over. I made it home safely, but bashed the garage doorframe when trying to park - oops? dad wasn't amused.

although, he never learned (I hope) about the time one summer when I borrowed it again in the middle of the night to go driving about to escape the heat. I wanted a beer, but it was too late, so got a soda at the convenience store - and considered that extremely lucky, because I made a California-stop at a red light, not noticing the freaking State Trooper just behind me. the ticket wasn't fun, but nicked for 'open container' would have been much less good.

I've also scraped several of those big yellow posts in parking lots - I swear I'm keeping an eye open for them, but somehow they just leap out at me.

a year or so ago I was pulling into a drive-up ATM, and while paying careful attention to the yellow post, managed to drive directly into the curbing and puncture my tire. the fsssssssh of escaping air wasn't good, and replacing the tire didn't make my day either

then there was the time I was driving innocently along, and a guy swung open the door of his parked 70s 2-door sedan, and knocked my side mirror off. I was totally in my lane, but the street's very narrow there and his car door extremely wide.