The Eternal Cringe Thread • Page 20

I got a summer job at a house painting company either the summer before starting college or the one after freshman year. They asked if I could drive stick and I was eager to get the job so I told them I could learn. My dad drives stick so we practiced a couple times. I probably wasn't ready regardless but either way it turns out driving stick on a new wagon isn't the same as on a decades old pick up truck. So immediately on my first day I'm tasked to back this truck out of a narrow garage/office with people all around and I ended up almost running over one of the bosses. I can still vividly remember sitting on the curb around the corner after this all went down waiting for my dad to pick me up, truly mortified and near tears.

I still ended up working there for the summer and it was fine but I remember once or twice some other worker (it was mostly late high school/early college types from which this company was exploiting labor) being like "oh yeah aren't you the one who..." so that was always fun

 

Damn, these are some top tier driving stories lmao

 

You're all really bad at cars.

 

My dad had me practice driving in an empty parking lot which makes more sense after reading your stories

How would you know what to do

 

My cousin told me this story about how he was meeting his new Gf's parents at their lake house. They're all out on her parents boat all day. He dropped them off and they asked if he'd park it at their pier just a hundred yards away or so. I don't think he had much of an experience driving a boat, but he had been doing it all day and was just like, "sure no problem, I can do that". So right in front of her and her family he had just met, he cuts the motor too late and crashes into their pier, fucking up their family pier/boat

They're not together now. The pier is still broken up about it.

 

When I started driving I thought you pushed the gas with your right foot and brake with your left. Two pedals, two feet - made perfect sense to me! My dad had to convince me that I should only use one foot.

Also for some reason I had no concept of slowing to a stop, so I would just go full speed and then slam on the brake at the last second. I remember having my driving instructor pushing his emergency brake pedal in the passenger seat a few times. I went golfing with my dad around this time and he let me drive the cart, but after about two holes one of the course attendants came out and told us I couldn't drive anymore because the whole course could hear me squealing wheels when I hit the park brake at full speed to stop the cart.

 

You ever flip a golf cart and break your friends foot to pieces but neither of you realized until the next day?

 

I have not! But this is a strangely specific question...

 

Yeah!

 

When my older sister was a teenager with just a permit my mom went into the store and left us in the car. My sister and her friend wanted to appear cool to these guys and cricle around the parking lot. She did that successfully iirc but when she went to park the car back she somehow lodged the front of the car into the car in front facing ours in the space opposite us. Two random stranger guys showed up and volunteered to try to back the car up and unhook the cars and my sister let them?? And they reversed it which tore my moms front bumper thing off her car and then they bailed. So I had to go into the store and tell my mom what happened. She'd had the car maybe two weeks? Also my little sister was asleep in the back seat during all of this lmao. I remember having to give my statement to the police officer and was convinced I forgot to tell them something and they'd come back to arrest me

 

The lack of mechanical sympathy in this thread is astounding.

I know some people who have done some seriously dumb stuff with cars, but these stories are great.

Maybe we're less prone to fucking up (in the above ways) when we're learning here because we almost all learn with manual gearboxes. If you can't operate the clutch, the worst you're going to do is hop the car around until the gearbox is toast. So, if the idea of braking smoothly is tough, you probably aren't going to get the car moving in the first place.

 

That violin story reminds me of one. I chose orchestra as my art elective in sixth grade and my parents outright bought me a violin rather than rented one. Like a week into class, one day I decided to put the violin in my chair as I went to get a music stand. When I got back to my seat, I totally forgot about it and I sat down without looking. Needless to say I broke my instrument beyond repair, had to quit orchestra, and have hated myself for it ever since

 

On intense hills when I drove stick, sometimes i'd just ride the clutch and let the car roll back and then move up a two feet, roll back two feet, pull up two feet, etc. instead of actually stopping. This would REALLY fuck up the car. It would get up to about 5RPM sometimes and smell like burnt rubber and then it'd refuse to go above about 20mph for about 10 minutes.

Anyway, I thought it was funny at the time but you really shouldn't do that.

 

Oh, and I made up a pretty tight game when I first learned to drive.
Rule 1: You don't tell anyone in the car that you're playing a game.
Rule 2: You cannot stop the car at a red light.

So basically you just try to get to your destination without stopping. Lotta right turns. Really fun stuff.

 

When I was about 19, I was driving my parent's SUV to meet up with a friend and some acquaintances at some gas station. I was driving pretty fast, as I was wont to do, and the route to the meeting place took me past my friend's house. I saw him and the others still there, so halfway past the turn I decided I'd stop there instead of just waiting the few minutes at the gas station. Well, naturally, I couldn't slow the SUV much at such a late time and yet still almost made the turn clean.

But I didn't.

Ended up hitting the curb on the left side of the street and bending the front axle of the SUV. It made a huge noise and made everyone there jump. It didn't damage the curb or anything, but we all decided it was best I leave that area quickly.

Naturally there's no way to hide that I fucked up the axle from my parents so I tried to claim I got run off the road by someone and that's when it got damaged. They didn't believe me, but surprisingly never really make a huge fuss either. Helps I largely never got into trouble, I guess?

(Least it was less of an issue than the time my sister backed her car into a vehicle my father had sold that day online to someone. Or hit our stucco mailbox, somehow.)

 

Science fair experiment that year
Can you play violin with your butt
Conclusion - no

 

oh and another one from middle school and sorry not on topic with car stuff

In 7th grade I was in a web programming class where the teacher was a dick, but also I was an idiot. Me and like two other guys would kind of antagonize the teacher but nothing so bad that we could get in trouble for it. Also, when I was done with assignments I would mess around online looking at music stuff. Well, I ended up downloading the video for Tenacious D's "Fuck Her Gently" but never actually watched it. The teacher found it in my saved files, called it pornography, and reported it to the office. I got kicked out of the class and got stuck in study hall for the rest of the semester. To top things off, he saw me walking through the hall with a girl I was talking to and he told her I was a pervert

I did a lot of dumb things in middle/high school. Like snorting Smarties for attention

 

amazing they did not grant me the research funding after the work was already done

 

lol he did kinda hit that A major though

 

When me and my bff were in hs and she had her first car she decided to go to the carwash but it wouldn't accept her card and we didnt have cash. It was one of those that does it for u while u sit in the car so the car wash garage door thing wasnt open to drive thru it since she hadn't paid and there was a car behind her so she couldn't back out to leave. So she decided to turn right and just leave that way. But we didnt realize we were on an incline ramp deal with a high curb and she drove her car off the ramp and it got stuck halfway off the curb. luckily there was an auto shop next door and they had to come and jack her car up and help get her car off the platform and we were 16 year old douchebags in her little convertible holding everything up so basically we just died of shame. I still go to that car wash and panic that it will somehow happen again and that auto shop isnt there anymore to help!!

 

After graduating college I invited a bunch of my friends to come hang at a timeshare my parents owned in Orlando. We ended up driving from MD to FL and since there were 8 of us my dad let us take his Navigator. We left around 8pm and decided to drive through the night, so we were all pretty burned out when we stopped at a Waffle House around 6am the next morning. One of my friends downed about 6 cups of coffee and when we got back on the road he was fully loaded on caffeine and sleep deprivation, bouncing around in the front passenger seat and talking twice as fast as normal. He saw a fly in the car and closed-fist punched the thing, hitting and cracking the windshield in the process.

Thankfully the crack was thin enough that you couldn't tell if it was on the inside or outside, so we told my dad that a rock flew up and hit the windshield and he claimed it on insurance.

 

Lastly I used to lock my keys in my old car ALL THE TIME. luckily the back window thing above the trunk opened up and I could crawl thru it into the trunk and crawl up to the drivers seat. I did this ALL THE TIME. like I have a key problem one time I left my keys in the ignition for 3 days before realizing I locked them in there like eventually I had to get a spare key just for when I locked my keys in. Anyway, I am a social worker and at my old job they were cheap af and I had to use my personal vehicle to conduct home visits. so I'd meet with these families at their homes as the professional that I am, and often I'd come back to get into my car and realize my keys were in there so I'd have to crawl thru the back window and hope to God they weren't watching me, the professional social worker tasked to help them sort their lives out, crawl thru the back window of my car. And also hope that cops didnt assume I was breaking into a car and arrest me. Fun times.

Also I'm that old person that retells the same stories. I need a more interesting life to get new stories. But better stories than this

 

bruv that's fraud.


JK your friend sounds awesome

 

i did too (we probably all did to some extent) and i'm kind of glad i got it all out of my system back then before it could really do any lasting damage.

i didn't snort smarties but i did sniff some Coke - like, the soda, at a outdoor school concert thing once in 9th(?) grade. my parents picked me and my friends up at the end of the night and we're all quiet / tired on the ride back and then a girl in the back, who we were giving a ride to JUST TO BE NICE, chirps up and goes, "i can't believe you snorted all that coke!"

there wasn't much of a conversation that took place, my step-dad just oddly chuckled while my mom seemed to not even hear it.