Keep Hoping Machine Running (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thefourthvine) wrote2009-05-19 11:52 am
thefourthvine) wrote2009-05-19 11:52 am
Entry tags:
Driving Shame
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.
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.
no subject
- 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
no subject
"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.)
no subject
Right?, and at sixteen, you don't necessarily have the presence of mind to say "Look, if you're already saying 'next time', why don't I just not do this today and save both of us the twenty minutes?" (Or "Maybe there's someone else I could go with, who doesn't have a personal vendetta against my family?" Like it would have occurred to me to suggest that a DMV examiner recuse herself. [g])
Of course, the presence of mind of sixteen-year-olds is something that entertains me greatly these days, as kids I've known since they were about nine are getting into high school, and suddenly know everything. But that's another story.