Skip to main content

TIFU by pretending to know how to drive a manual car

So my friend asked me to move his car yesterday while he was carrying a bunch of boxes up to his apartment, and I immediately said sure because in my head moving a car twenty feet barely even counts as driving. Then I got in and saw the extra pedal. Manual. Now before everyone calls me an idiot, I knew what a manual transmission was. I've watched people do it. I've seen enough Fast & Furious movies to be dangerous. I played way too much Gran Turismo growing up. I just never actually drove one.

At that point my friend was already halfway up the stairs carrying a giant storage bin, and for some reason my brain decided admitting I didn't know how to drive stick would be more embarrassing than whatever came next. Huge mistake. I started the car. Instant stall. Started it again. Another stall. By the third attempt I got it moving, but not in a controlled responsible-adult kind of way. More like a scared horse escaping a barn. The car jumped forward, I panicked, my feet completely forgot what their jobs were, and the engine died again. Suddenly I was sitting diagonally across two parking spaces.

That's when I noticed people watching. Not a crowd exactly. Just enough people to make it worse. A guy loading groceries. A woman walking a dog. Some teenager leaning on a cart return. Any normal person would've gotten out right there and accepted defeat. Unfortunately I am not a normal person. I doubled down.

I don't even remember exactly what sequence of pedals I used next, but the car started moving again in this violent bucking motion like it was personally offended that I was operating it. At one point I was convinced I had figured it out. I had not. The car lurched directly toward a shopping cart return and I slammed the brakes so hard my sunglasses launched off my face and hit the dashboard. The woman with the dog actually stopped walking. That's how bad it looked.

Then my friend finally noticed something was wrong and came jogging back outside. He opened the driver's door and just stared at me. I was sweating, the engine was off, my sunglasses were on the passenger seat, and the car had successfully traveled maybe twelve feet. He goes, Why didn't you just tell me you can't drive stick? And all I could come up with was, "I thought I'd figure it out." He stared at me for a second and said, Dude, you've moved this car twelve feet and almost hit three different things.

I wish that was the end of it. Last night he sent me a video. Apparently one of the people watching thought someone was stealing the car and started recording. So now there is actual footage of me repeatedly stalling, lurching, panicking, disappearing behind the steering wheel, and generally looking like I'm fighting a mechanical bull. The worst part is that from the outside it genuinely looks like the transmission is trying to kill me.

TL;DR: Saw a manual transmission, decided confidence was more important than honesty, moved a car approximately twelve feet, almost hit a cart return, gained an audience, and now there is video evidence of my stupidity.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by putting my already skinny jeans in the dryer on high heat.

TL;DR: Was stupid and didn't realize I put my clothes on extra high heat in the dryer. Had to rock skintight skinny jeans all day with tighty whities (only clean pair I had since I procrastinate doing laundry like crazy). I guess the constant wedgies and squishing are punishment for my stupidity. Honestly don’t know who else to blame but myself for this. I’m a scatterbrained guy so I literally put the highest setting on a load with most of my clothes, and my skinny jeans that I was planning to wear today. You can probably already see where this is going, but somehow I didn’t. For context, these jeans were already pushing the limits of what could reasonably be called wearable. They fit, technically, but only in the sense that I could get them on with enough determination and a bit of strategic breathing. Sitting down in them was more of a commitment than a casual action. Still, they looked good, and I had convinced myself that discomfort was just part of the aesthetic. So this m...
Post a Comment
Read more