Lucky me.
Our General Manager is away for a week and instructed his PA to look after his car (and organise a oil change & service for it). She’s decided that there’s not enough room on her driveway for another car, so she’s given me the job. I think this was very generous of her.
Aside from just being a very nice car, there’s a few other perks:
- Guaranteed parking space at work, as opposed to ‘likely to be two or three streets away’.
- Ten disc CD changer.
- It’s not my fuel costs.
On the flipside, however, comes the responsibility not to receive any fines for speeding, or get into any kind of accident. Whilst this isn’t a problem, a (small) part of me wonders what it’d be like to get onto the open road and really see what this thing can do. Compared to my own car, this thing’s got monstrous performance - it could easily become addictive.
Vvvrrooooommmmm! Accelerate any faster, and I’ll need astronaut training to cope with the G-forces.
Of course, the comments I’d receive from co-workers if I did damage the boss’ car would be far worse than mere death, dismemberment or jellification caused by an accident - even if I was 0% to blame. Stuff up in my own 12-year old car, and no-one minds. Make even a tiny error in a ‘cool’ car - I’ll not hear the last of it for twelve years or more.
There’s also the matter of fiddling around with things inside the car. Not personal effects - there’s not really anything left in it of a personal nature, but I’m talking about the extra buttons and stuff that you get in the ‘executive’ model cars that I’ve never seen before. There’s a little button with a sort of stick figure picture on it. Is this an ejector seat button? A ‘get out and walk’ button? Auto Pilot? I’ve no clue, and I don’t want to find out the hard way by either:
a) ejecting myself at an intersection.
or
b) causing an electronic voice to blare “Auto Pilot not available whilst stationary!” when I’m still in the car park, surrounded by co-workers.
So it’s quite likely that the stick man button will remain unpressed for the duration.
Other stuff has caused momentary confusion. The CD player doesn’t appear to have either a ‘play’ or a ‘stop’ button. Every possible ‘random play’, ‘shuffle’ and ‘memory’ function is there, but so far, I haven’t been able to take my eyes off the road for long enough to scroll through all the menu options that this thing holds. For all I know, I could alter satellite orbits from here, but I’m not going to fiddle around in the car park (with co-workers gleefully realising that I’m techno-clueless) or when I’m meant to be looking at the road, and all its myriad of hazards which could cause an accident involving me.
I can turn the fan on, but there isn’t an ‘off’ button. So it’s now on ‘low’.
There’s a ‘power’ button next to the stick column. Sheesh - that’d better not be like Knight Rider’s ‘turbo boost’. If I’m ever going to press that, be assured that there’s gonna be nothing in front of me for about two miles - no way am I going to catapult myself over the top of six cars straight into a tree, thank you very much.
Anyone ever had similar experiences of:
a) Car-related techno-cluelessness?
b) Cool-Car-Induced Co-worker Jokes About How You Stuffed Up?