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More fun than you can shake a stick at
Today at work, I had to take a cab to Geylang Lorong 3 and collect an old Toyota goods van that the Conservatory was renting for two days. To say that it was an adventure is putting it mildly. Firstly, it was an old van. An old, old, van. So it was kinda tired and worn-out. But I can handle that - it wasn't anything a good cosmetic do-over couldn't fix. But it was also old on the inside, meaning it was a manual drive. Again, that I can handle - my dad owns a manual car, after all. The trick was this: it had an inverted version of the usual configuration of gear locations, with NO fifth gear, and the gearstick was located on the side of the steering wheel.
The usual state of manual gears
in cars look like this: | But this Toyota did the wild thing: | 135
24R | X31
R42 |
| where R is reverse, and X is NO GEAR |
So it was quite an exciting time, trying to even start the car up and put it in reverse to take it out of the parking lot. I think the scruffy man (who apparently owned this pathetic excuse for a vehicle) was rather worried for the tin heap. I saw him eyeing me rather warily as I gingerly turned the steering wheel toward THEFAST&THEFURIOUS road.
And that was another thing - no power steering! Wrestling with the road for the first time, since I've been a power steering kid almost all my life. And to think I used to think it was fun trying pretending to be in the car, in charge of the steering wheel. Now I know why my dad used to come out of the car perspiring after trying to park in a particularly difficult spot.
But is that all, you ask? Surely this little anecdote is at its sorry little end? That's what I thought too - hey, got the car on the road, working the gearbox pretty hard, but hey, I'm going forward, aren't I? Then I looked down, only to find that I was driving at a whopping ... ... 0 kilometres per hour. All the time. Yep, the speedometer was broken, and the junk-on-wheels didn't have an RPS (revolutions per second) monitor, which meant that I had to rely purely on hearing to tell if it were time to change gear, risking an engine blowout should the engines overheat.
Good day? Maybe.
Exciting? Surely.
Do it again? Definitely.
[edited slightly because i'm an idiot; thanks marcus!]
[More fun than you can shake a stick at]
Sngs Alumni @ 26.11.03 { }
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