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I know I learned to drive a stick when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t hard to pull up those memories and recall how it felt to keep screwing it up.
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Thoos was still pulled over by the police, and the officer said, “so, is there something I can help you with?” Annoyed, Thoos said, “not with mere Earth tech. First thing you’d suggest for transferring my brain back would be with a scalpel.” Smiling, the officer said, “I don’t know much about that. But maybe if you told me why you were driving like a crazy woman I could help there.” Deflated, Thoos said, “meh. That’s just me trying to learn how to drive a ‘stick’?” Smiling coyly, the officer said, “oh, that’s easy. You’ll get it. There are all the rules, but in the end it’s more a matter of feel. Just think of it kinda like love.” Annoyed, Thoos said, “it feels more kinda like hate to me.” The officer leaned in and handed her his business card and said, “Keep at it. And here, call me if you want a private ‘stick’ lesson when I get off my shift. I have the whole night free.” Taking his card, Thoos said, “thank you. If only you could help me get into outer space. Grinning, the officer said, “oh, can I.”
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I don’t think we’ve actually seen Audri’s hexapodiphilic boyfriend, until now.
Funny! I could entertain with those types of embarrassing tales!
In panel 2, I think transferring has 2 Rs… it does according to my autocorrect, though it’s been wrong before. ???? You got it correct in the alt-text ????????
I’ve never driven anything other than stick (manual in UK terms) apart from a rental car in the US. And I must be a natural with stick, because I never had any trouble with it. Maybe understanding the mechanics behind it helped me.
I _thought_ that cop was being unrealistically nice, especially to a driver of color, but now his game is revealed. I hope Thoosaudri cleans his clock, in an untraceable way.
To be fair, it’s not entirely unreasonable for an over-eager fetishist keeping an eye out for “fellow travelers”, so to speak, to mistake her rambling for suggestive innuendo. I do stress “over eager”; he’s clearly too inexperienced to wisely discern a kinky girl from a (functionally) crazy one.
It depends quite a bit on where you are and just what “driving like a crazy woman” actually translates to. She’s not being rude or disrespectful. She’s not on a main road where she’s impeding traffic. Some of the cops around here would cheerfully offer to give her a lesson that wasn’t an innuendo.
Most motorcycles are manual, but there’s been a small handful that have auto or semi-auto transmissions. My first car, a Ford Bronco, had a 3-speed manual on the column. My next car, an MG MGC/GT, had 4-on-the-floor with overdrive.
I went to high school at a time when driver education was still a thing. We swapped between training in simulators and actual driving on streets. The cars were all automatic but the simulators had the option to be set as either auto or manual. I was disappointed we never got training on manual shifting in the simulators. When I bought my Bronco Dad had to teach me how to use the clutch and shift.
Manual trans also applies to column shifted 3-speeds. Want to mess with someone? Put them in one of those. As in ‘Why does this automatic have three pedals’. Heck, even a 3 on the floor is fun. They always begin my sticking it into reverse (which is where 1st is on 4- and 5-speeds). Ha!
Learned how to drive stick in a racing van, on backroads along the Yellowstone river, towing a flatbed trailer with three dogs on it…. ’cause in Montana, it was go big or go home. Upside: I can definitely drive stick. Downside: I drive like it’s a racing transmission, which isn’t great for normal ones.
I learned to drive a manual when I got my first editing job twenty miles from home and a manual Subaru was all I could afford. I got one lesson, then did makee-learnee all the way to the garage to get it checked out (I hadn’t ruined the clutch yet) and then home on city streets. Not quite as noisily as Thoos here, but it was decidedly a steep learning curve. But like riding a bike, the skill stays with you. You don’t have to think about it, which leaves you time to remember the grinding, the hair-raising screeches, and the close calls. At least I sneaked past the cops. And no one made a pass at me, more’s the pity.
I was pretty sure that officer is canadian right up until panel 5, where he spilled the cheese.
Officer Way-Too-Friendly.
My wife and I bought a stick shift Toyota once because she wanted to drive one (she had long experience, I had zero). Of course, I had to learn stick too, and I did my training on a trip into the mountains. That’s called diving into the deep end.
After that, downtown San Francisco.