The other day I was treated to a very entertaining and nostalgic spectacle – teenagers with a car they had no business driving. The car appeared to be out of fuel; which is what usually happens when you are a penniless teen trying to look cool driving a car around a small town.

Anyway, I was taking a walk in that direction so I slowed down to enjoy the entertainment and reminisce about decades past when I was in their (smelly!) shoes. I thought about the thrill of getting away with a car, the terror of the first time you damage the car and how much heavier cars were in those days. If you had to push, you were going to raise a healthy sweat! The young people these days have it easy – even one person can push a car easily. So I wondered why it was taking the three boys so long to move the car… Granted, they were going backwards on a slight slope, but still, they should have been able to handle it.

After a while of watching them I realised what was wrong – I could see the unmistakable white lights showing that they had the car in reverse gear. I almost sat down by the roadside to laugh. I guess it seemed logical to them that if they were pushing the car backward, then they had to put it in reverse. They seemed genuinely bewildered as to why the car would not respond. When the engine is off and you are pushing a car, having it in gear will get you nowhere. The car has to be in neutral.

The advantage of growing up with seven brothers and strictly manual cars is that one of the first things I knew about was ‘rolling’ the car in free. And jump-starting it of course. But you cannot jump start an automatic car… not without the whole drama of jumper cables and a second vehicle, by which time you will have been caught by whichever adult you stole the car from, or spotted by a family friend who is sure to report to the relevant authorities.

I had a good laugh and left the lads to their devices, but I couldn’t help having a sobering thought: Perhaps all this automatic business is part of the reason we are having so many accidents. People get into machines expecting them to do all the work and when the machine doesn’t respond to ‘drive’ and ‘park’ then they are lost. Or they panic and do the wrong thing. These boys were lucky they were on a wide avenue in well planned and uncongested Jinja. I can only imagine what might have happened had they been in a busier more inconsiderate environment.

Published on Sunday December 13, 2009