Subject: Re: TAN: (Unbelieveably TAN) Vehicles From: jsn@concentric.net (John S. Novak, III) Organization: Cynics Central Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 21:42:52 -0500, Dave Rothgery wrote: >> Regardless of which side of the holy war to take, though, it's probably a >> really good idea to at least learn how to drive standard well. >Why (asks someone who's never driven a standard in his life, and never >will, if he can avoid it)? Because every once in a while, you end up in a situation where you're on a long road trip, say with college buddies, on the way home. The car taken is a manual and the guy driving is the owner. He's been too fucking stupid to get enough sleep to drive even maginally competently for the last half of the trip, and he's got something so important back at campus the next day that he won't stop for a hotel room. He's also too much of a tight-ass to let anyone else learn to drive a manual in his car, even though highway driving is the most trivial possible application of manual transmission driving. Just get it up to speed and keep it there. Then you're treated to the metronomic ZZ-ZZ-ZZ of the tires hitting the rumble strip at the side of the because dipshit keeps taking four second microsleeps every two fucking milemarkers. By the time you finally reach home, you've made "ohshit handles" in the doors where there were none before by pinching through the doorframe with your bare hands, you find yourself thinking about actually kissing the ground in Peoria with relief at actually having arrived alive, and your buttocks are so clenched with sheer terror that it takes three days, a pack and a half of Ex-Lax, and the Seven Dwarves administering a firehose enema before you can properly take another crap. _That's_ why you learn to drive a fuckin' manual. -- John S. Novak, III jsn@concentric.net The Humblest Man on the Net