I don’t have a linky, but apparently there was a stat a couple years back in the UK showing that a very high percentage of car accidents there involved left-side-driver cars, usually driven by tourists from mainland Europe who brought their car over. The guys on the radio were turning that one around for a few days, one of them wondered whether it might even make more economic sense to leave the car home, fly and rent - instead of running some back of the envelope calculation, he got actual figures and yes, for many people it was cheaper. Their guess (and mine, based on the conversations I’d had with the rest of my Spanish coworkers there) is that people were more afraid of driving an unfamiliar car than on driving on roads set the wrong way for your car.
Our own experience was that it didn’t take much longer to get used to “everything is flipped” than to “this is not my car and where the bloody hades do these people hide the lights?”
I know someone who bought a wrong-hand car on purpose (well, Littlebro does): his hobby is fancy cars, he buys them preferably in not-so-good shape, fixes them and doesn’t go beyond four of them. If there is another one he wants, he must sell one of the four current toys. The only time he drove his wrong-side car was for hobby car meetings or on the racetrack (the garage where he keeps the toys is beside one): the idea of risking this doll in regular traffic made him go white, Littlebro says. “Local cabbies are scary enough when I’m in the A4, I’m not letting the Rover within 100km of them!”
Not that I’m doubting you, but how often do you see this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a right-hand-drive car except when I was in a country that drives on the left side of the road.
All well and good when you have the option, as with friends (or sometimes even family). Not so much with something like a job.
Wow. What a dick. I especially love his “It wasn’t my intention to hurt the animal.” What, you think kicking a living creature is going to help it?
Update … I asked the gal at the front desk (at school) to fax things for me on Tuesday night. When I called the places on Wednesday, all of the faxes had gone through BLANK. Yep - she loaded the pages upside down! So I had to ask the daytime receptionist to send them for me again (we are not allowed access to the fax machine). She gave me attitude about even doing it, even though we’ve been told that we can have things faxed for us. And then I call the places again today to ensure that they’ve gone through properly, and only one of them did! ARGH again. Thankfully, those clinics do have email, so I was at least able to re-re-send them today.
I am having HORRIBLE anxiety issues over this and all of these little bumps along the road are not helping!
Let’s not joke about this sort of thing. I was found once faxing a reference letter to a grant agency. Trouble is, said letter was in a sealed envelope. I had no idea why everyone in the office was standing around laughing at me sending a fax.
The librarian at my old school was surprised to find out that you needed to fill the fax machine with paper; she thought that it was sent along with the message.
Ugh, gross. My symathies. Current dire need (i.e., lost your job), anticipating dire need soon (i.e., expecting to lose your job), or looking for something different (i.e., hate your job)?
Actually, IIRC around that time I was programming in BASIC.
You’re a better man than I, then–there’s a decent chance I’m looking at a layoff but hell if I can bring myself to even look at my resume. I loathe that shit with a passion.
