In article ,
"Mortimer" writes:
"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
.. .
It can be amusing when US colleagues come over here and rent a car.
Car hire companies usually get this right by themselves and give
Americans automatics without them having to ask, but sometimes that
fails, and an American trying to drive a manual is a complete
non-starter. We've had several calls from the airport over the
years when they've got stuck there with no automatics available to
rent.

I used to work with a guy whose father worked in a car hire company at
Heathrow airport. He witnessed an American trying to drive a manual car away
from the car park where it had been parked end-to-end between several other
cars. The driver kept stalling because he didn't apply enough revs before
letting the clutch up, so he overcompensated and got the engine up to about
4000 rpm before letting the clutch up smartly. The car shot into the car in
front, catapulting that car forward into the car in front of it. In his
panic to extricate himself from this situtation, he then processed to do the
same in reverse to the cars behind him. The total bill was three cars
written off (American's car plus the one in front and the one behind) and
two cars needing major surgery (the ones two in front and two behind).

Had an interesting discussion with one of my US team members
when he was staying over here for a couple of weeks. I asked him
why he got in to work so early over here (8am) when he normally
never arrived in the office before 11:30 in the US? He paused for
a long time, and then eventually said that it was due to our car
park. I must have looked very puzzled at that point -- although it
got full, there were exactly enough spaces. He went on, the spaces
were rather smaller than a US car park, and unless it was pretty
empty when he arrived, he couldn't squeeze his car (a small hire
car) into a space without fear of clobbering another car. Ah, US
car parking spaces, even those labelled "compacts" (which are for
large European sized cars rather than gigantic US ones), include
enough space to fling the doors wide open without dinging the next
car. Ours don't, of course. I hadn't realised what a problem that
caused a US driver, not used to using our sized parking spaces.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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