Note: Any reference to “nagasaki clan” does not mean I’ve Japanese blood in my veins. I have just changed it to protect our identity.
Hi Folks,
I am new to Team-BHP and I just wrote an introduction about myself on this other thread:
http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/introd...re-diesel.html
I've just joined this awesome forum now and I really do want to contribute many articles; but in front of the experts here, what can I really say? I will pale like the Moon in front of the Sun; or like
Nara in front of
Narayana. I did not TD a car recently, nor did I buy one. But I still do want to write. So I will try doing what I know best. Write about embarrassing situations that I've been in thanks to being technologically challenged at certain points in my life.
It is a well-established fact that the tenacity of the human race to resist and survive against multiple ordeals has given us an evolutionary advantage and has made us the super predator over the last 100,000 years ever since we battled it out with the Neanderthals/nature for real estate. We call it civilization, progress, the march of humanity, pinnacle of scientific engineering.
As Isaac Newton once very humbly said, “All we do is stand on the shoulders of giants”. That astute observation, even better than the one which my grandfather made many aeons back, “Is it lunch time already? Let’s get the puja done ASAP and go eat”; is what that has always defined our species from the rest. Before you start sneering and roll your eyes, let me add that we members of the Nagasaki clan take our food very seriously. It is said in our family history; written on papyrus scrolls that when the British and the French battled it out for control of Madras back in the day; my family got mildly upset that they missed their lunch that day and my old ancestor said, “humpfff!” in riposte.
Coming back to the story, the message that I wanted to convey is that most of our scientific endeavours have boiled down to two very simple things:
1) Is it going to make my existence easier?
2) Will this help me sit at home or maybe not move a muscle?
Long before the romans suddenly discovered that they could build awesome aqueducts, roads and bridges, the most ingenious “thing” that we humans did was to domesticate the horse. About 5000 years back, we discovered that we could simply sit on top of them and ride all day without having to walk or run. That discovery went viral and most of the known world adopted it very soon. That remained pretty much the same until we built the modern machines.
The car is a wonderful invention and it has helped shaped our modern world but on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes these machines are so “engineered” that they can truly create embarrassing situations for dumb people like me. And this post titled “The modern car and the technologically challenged ” is just to highlight some of these comical situations that I’ve found myself in, over the years. You see, we members of the Nagasaki clan never give up. You can punch us down but we bob right back up like an un-flushable
. In the face of overwhelming technology, we remain unnervingly calm, collected and cool and adopt an expression which can be defined as a cross between attaining nirvana and feeling sleepy.
1.Driving the Automatic car for the first time:
It was 2007 and my first visit to America and all I had driven until then was the humble Maruti 800. I got my rental car due to generous company policy and soon found that it was an automatic. Any sane person would have realized that the right foot should be used for both the accelerator and the brake but not me. Due to some very strange reason, which I still cannot fathom, I used my right foot for the accelerator and the left foot for the brake. It was an extremely silly and dangerous thing to do and it took me a ride of 10 kilometres to realize that I was doing it all wrong! The Neanderthal would have figured it out in a minute but not me. I still don’t understand why! Thankfully I did not get into any accident then (almost hit a wall but).
2.Rear Defoggers
That very first day after I figured out how to drive the car, I realized that I had to stay late in office that day as I had work. It was winter in California and when I got out of office at 10 PM, I realized that the windows were completely covered in fog. Growing up in South India, I never knew about de-foggers in car and it was a comical situation. I took some tissue paper and wiped my car windows clean for a few minutes and started driving. Within no time, the fog was up again on the windows. I used the wiper to clean the fog ahead but I had no clue about what I had to do with the rear windows. Since I was new to the country and extremely cautious about my driving, I actually stopped a few times to wipe the rear windows. Next day when told my friends about it, they all had a good laugh and told me about the front and rear defogger in the car and I felt so silly after that. Looking back, it all seems so funny.
3.Seat heater.
Another day, another time, I was driving another rental car in Los Angeles; this time, the culprit was a Chevy Impala and I did not know that the car came with seat heaters. Not once in my life before that had I heard of such a thing. I had the car for 2 days and everything was smooth sailing; the car was built and handled like a tank. I must have accidently pressed the driver seat heater button and the seat started to heat up! I really thought something was wrong with the car engine or something. I stopped the car and opened the hood like any person would. Of course I had no idea what to look for inside, but it seemed like the right thing to do in such circumstances. I let the car rest for some time and continued my journey only to face the same problem again. I was at my wit’s end when thankfully a call to my friend sorted out the problem!
I know what you guys are thinking.
Is this guy such a doofus? Well, I’d like to think not but as we have this old saying in Tamil, “Even an elephant can occasionally slip.” I will take heart from that.
I will not talk about the episode when I had to drive through complete fog on the mountains with occasional the deer testing the drivers. That was scary and great at the same time.
So guys, what other such issues have you faced? Let us know. Let the world know for posterity!
Thanks for reading!
Nivatakavacha