That reminds me. A particularly smartassy friend of mine was following me in another car to a restaurant the other night. When we got out of the car, he said, “Hey, your car must be low on blinker fluid.”
:rolleyes:
The ‘?’ sign (usually with a direction-indicating arrow) means ‘tourist information ahead’. The ones I’ve seen were white on a brown background.
Yes, it might make more sense to have a lower-case ‘i’, now that I think about it.
While I was riding with my mother the other day - her the driver, I the uneasy occupant - she became enraged at a motorist turning.
“TURN ON YOUR GOD DAMN TURN SIGNAL!!”, she said. “HOW CAN I SEE YOU TURNING IF YOU DON’T USE THE DAMN SIGNAL?!?!”
This was at an intersection. We were turning right. She did not indicate this.
Okay, I wasn’t thinking about backing up at night and seeing the reflection. :smack:
I don’t parallel park that much (but I can!), but I am a backer-inner in parking lots and I back up into my garage. I don’t think about looking for the reflection of the lights - I’m concentrating on backing up.
I used to think that those Do Not Pass signs that you see on the highway (usually in areas where the number of lanes is diminishing due to construction) meant not to pass the sign. I was convinced that my parents were going wildly afoul of the law every time one of them whizzed past one of those signs with me in the car.
Back in High School, my bitchin’ ride was Dad’s Ford Escort wagon. (It was brown.) One of perqs (if not the only one) of that car was it had a standard shift transmission. Which meant I could be driving along, hit the clutch, slide the stick over into the “reverse” slot (but not bring the shifter up to the R which would have been silly) and the back-up lights would come on even without the car actually being in reverse.
This disconcerted tailgaters now and again.
I do not miss driving that car.
Dang! “Preview” not “Submit”…
More to the point Inigo, I had a friend who drove an old truck. The switch that turned his back-up lights on when he shifted in to reverse broke. Rather than fixing the switch he just by-passed it. (Or someone did anyway. Might not have been him.) There was a toggle switch on the dash that would turn on the back-up lights when he wanted to back up. Only he had to remember to toggle the switch back off to turn the back-up lights off again. He’d forget to do that and so he’d be driving around (forward) with his back-up lights burning.
Those switches, they can break. Then you can drive around with your back-up lights on even if you don’t have them wired to a switch on your dashboard.
Low on blinker fluid …snerk
The movie ** Almost Famous**…the band Sweetwater…I never knew that was fictional…until I blabbed it like a ditz in front of friends. Hey, I suck a music, m’kay, but I knew about back up lights.
Oh, and has anyone every picked up a hitchhiker near the ‘This is a prison area…do no pick up hitch hiker’ sign?
It is neither included in our driver’s ed curriculum nor is it required on the road test for our licenses. You can go your whole life in this state and never see on-street parking, and in areas like mine where it does happen, it’s not usually crowded enough to have to back in like you’re supposed to. Even if it is, there’s usually a parking lot close enough to pull in like normal.
FTR, I can parallel park my car, but with difficulty – because I get no practice, and I don’t remember the last time I had to. [/aside]
And as to the blinker fluid, I’ve always preferred to use the terms muffler bearings and clutch belt on my car-ignorant friends. Makes me giggle a little, anyway.
Wow, that is pretty amazing, but maybe they’re not all that noticeable against whatever colour the sky is on your planet.
Just kidding, but… wow… all the same
It’s really not taught in some states.
And while I learned, 10 years ago I commuted to SUNY New Paltz and needed it. Now I live north of Albany and never parallel park and would probably have to do it several times to get it right.
It’s required here in Maryland, or at least it was when I got my license in 1981. You got three tries to parallel park and be however many inches from the curb (6? 8? I dunno) or you failed. Yes, you failed the whole driving test.
Back in high school, my bitchin’ ride was Mom’s Chevy Caprice wagon, complete with fake wood paneling. We would have been quite the pair. 
(I did take my test on it, and pass, including the parallel parking. That thing was about 80 freaking feet long)
My mom has said it was the same when she got her licenses in Indiana and Georgia. But here in Florida, we just ignore it altogether. I should have clarified that I meant in Florida.
Neither Oregon nor Colorado require parallel parking during the driving test (as of 1998 and 2003, respectively).
I can sympathize with the OP. I've never heard anyone use the phrase "reversing lights" or generally talk about that part of the car at all. I've only had to parallel park a handful of times, and I generally back out in well-lit areas. If someone would have asked me what those lights were for, I'd probably have been able to answer before this thread -- but its fair to say I didn't know what reversing lights were before reading this.
<shrug>
The “exit only” thing baffles me. Although it would be nice to know when an exit does not allow an easy return to the freeway.
Well, the usual term is clutch band , but as you see, automatic transmissions do have a clutch belt.
Lived in Colorado when I turned 16 in 1991 and I can confirm that parallel parking was not part of the driving test so it was something I paid no attention to. Heck, in 14 years of driving, I have needed to parallel park maybe 3 times so it’s not like it has exactly come into play a lot.
I’m more amazed at the level of astonishment people have had in this thread that a person might not have realized this. Heck, I’m clearly not the only one that didn’t realize this. Ultimately, it’s a couple of tiny white lights lost in a much bigger see of red.
“see of red.”
Heh, admiration restored.
:smack: I lived in Florida from '85 to '88 and now I remember thinking the test to switch over to a FL license was insanely easy compared to Maryland. The examiner came out and was rather gruff. He said, “The three people before you failed. I hope you’re prepared.”
Scared me shitless. We just drove around the city streets for a few minutes and then he said, “Fine, you passed.”
When you sais you can’t believe how long you have lived not knowing this, I thought you were talking about not being backed over by car when you were a kid. That’s how I was taught to know that a car was backing up and I had better get out of the way.
Even though I know it, I’m not astonished that you didn’t.
For one, I seem to remember it dawning on me at some point. I always seem to have known that the lever on the left did the blinkers, there was an extra button for your hazards, you flicked a lever for high-beams, etc. But I actually learned some day, “oh, there are reverse lights on cars.”
Also, there are lots of things we see all the time that we don’t automatically make the connection on. Maybe you did parallel park and you just assumed it was well illuminated behind you. Maybe you saw a person in a parking lot go from reverse to forward and just didn’t put two and two together. It’s not like your first grade teacher is standing there going, “now, mullinator, what’s different between when the car is backing up and going forward.”
And, there’s NO WAY my driver’s ed instructor actually told us, “white lights come on when you go into reverse.”
I bet I saw a million mailboxes in my life with their flags up before I realized, “oh that means there’s mail in them.”