Stuck in Reverse on a Getaway

A typical manual transmission gear-shifter on what appears to be a real nice car. Photo from Flickr, accessed through Creative Commons

I'm getting an early start today, a huge day is ahead for me. A big 10:00-5:30 show on CKSW 570/CJSN 1490, including my historic first anniversary broadcast of the first time I hosted the Trading Post today at 11:30am. Going through the daily computer routines (weathereye, homepage, e-mail, Yahoo! e-mail, and the feeds) I noticed a rather odd story totally suitable for what I have written so far.

Some car thieves in Georgia tried to steal a Honda Accord, but they were eventually caught because they didn't know how to operate the manual transmission.

Now this is why everybody should learn how to drive a stick. Not for criminal applications, I assure you, but because you never know when you're gonna need it. My uncle once told me that use of a standard should be mandatory in the SGI drivers' education course. I can say that I don't disagree with him.

If you go to buy a car, and the most reasonably priced and/or only vehicles available have standard transmissions, what are you going to do if you don't know how to use it properly?

If you get a job, say in some sort of product transportation, and the delivery vehicle has a stick, I doubt the company's going to give up extra man-hours to train that person, and additional money to pay for any at-fault accidents.

The majority of this province is farm land. Most farm vehicles have manual transmissions. What are you going to do if you're stuck in the middle of the pasture in your John Deere tractor that you can't get out of second gear?

And there are other things that I could think of, but I can't get into because of many reasons I can't name (I think some of them even break those Ten Commandments I mentioned earlier).

I am not afraid to say that I am one of those people. I don't know how to drive a stick, and I honestly hope that I am never forced to do so. I am willing to learn sometime, just make sure I'm in an open area with no other innocent cars around. In the meantime I'll just leave the manual driving to the people who know.