I did not have to go far from home for today’s SPOTD. In fact, I only had to go out to my driveway.

For the benefit of those folk receiving this that have never seen the place Di and I live, it is a long block of flats that run perpendicular to the road, and there is a long driveway down one side of the flats from the road to the flats right down the other end. The road is a dead-end road, and so is pretty quiet, since the only vehicles on it are residents.

One of the people living in the flats above us is a young Asian fellow who has recently moved in. He is a bit of a hoon, and has a bright yellow car that has various racing stripes, personalised number plates, yellow wheel rims to match the car, and oversize plastic front and sides on it, as sold in the “young men obsessed with their cars” shops. In other words, all the typical stuff of a young idiot out to impress with a loud car stereo up and down the streets where - it is assumed - women will swoon over his choice of motor vehicle and throw themselves at him.

While I love to drive, I am pretty disparaging of these cars because I like to take my car into state forests and stuff, driving down dirt roads, over rocks, and pretty much anything that the car can (just) handle. Cars like the one described above are designed for the city alone, and I can’t understand those people that do not want to see the countryside every now and then without the need to own another car, or be restricted only to freeways and highways.

Before I left the flat this morning, I looked out of the balcony door and noticed that the yellow car was parked in the driveway, seemingly about to pull into his car space. I did not realise it at the time, but he was actually not doing that at all.

I got into my car, and I could see he was reversing down the driveway and out into the street, so I figured he had not been about to park, but rather, about to leave. I started up my car, and headed off (forwards) down the driveway following him. He reached the street, and that was when I realised there was a problem. One other thing he has done to the car is to lower it, so that it sits only a few inches from the road surface, in order to make it look much more cool.

The problem for him is that the driveway curves slightly up at the start, and the road has a camber such that it angles downward from the centre of the road to the edges (no worse than any other road). Each one by itself is not severe, but with the rear of his car going upward as it entered the road, and the front of his car going downward before it left the driveway, the front plastic bumper of his car was wedged into the concrete driveway. If he just accelerated backward at normal speed, he would have just ripped it straight off the front of the car.

So, while I was sitting in the driveway for about three minutes, he slowly backed out inch by inch, getting out every two inches to check the damage being done to his car, and then getting back in and backing it ever so slightly further out onto the road. I could see the entire front of the car shuddering and straining to stay on, as it scratched it’s way out the driveway.

Finally he got the car out and I was able to get out on the road as well, after the delay. I could see the front of his car has lost a lot of paint now and will probably need a re-coat if he does not want it to look damaged as he cruises around town. To make him feel bad, I drove out of the driveway as fast as I could, merrily zipping out without a problem in my crusty old non-cool, non-modified vehicle.

It was a very sweet feeling to know that he had probably spent a couple of grand at least to make his car look so much better than everyone else’s on the road, and yet, all he had done was to make himself a car that could not get out of the driveway without damage. From now on, his car will have to be kept out in the open, on the road, rather than in the carport, protected from the elements where a car like that really belongs…

Life is good.

Categories: SPOTD