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By Mark Fenton (anonymous) | Posted February 17, 2008 at 15:18:39
Joejoe,
Thanks for your provocative question. I'd like to say my reasons for walking most places are purely environmental. In fact, the reasons are much more selfish. I find I don't see as much when I drive. Perhaps I'm willfully perverse, but in the midst of an accelerated society I think there's something to be said for there being people who move as slowly as possible. Although it drives people walking with me absolutely crazy.
Walking doesn't absolve me from suspicion though. I'm stopped by police officers when I'm on foot even more often than when I'm driving. So I guess my walking is more erratic than my driving. The camera doesn't help.
Once, just after I got my licence I had a job writing copy for the provincial government in Alberta. One of the things I was expected to do was deliver publications to the legislature. I didn't have a car at the time but my boss said, no problem, I could use his BMW for deliveries. It was his pride and joy this car.
I really, really didn't want to drive this machine he'd dreamed of owning for all of his adult life. But what could I say?
Anyway, I got there and angle parked and delivered my box. I'd driven standards before but never on a European car, and the BMW shift had this weird motion I later learned where you push IN and then OVER and DOWN for reverse. But I couldn't get it and I was stuck with the car pointing into a curb. This is why smart people BACK into the parking spot. That way if the car is a rental or stolen or whatever they don't get stuck if the reverse action requires a mensa level IQ to figure out. They just keep going and parallel park on an empty street.
All I could think of was putting the car into neutral and getting out and pushing it back. If you've been to Edmonton you'll know that the legislative building is on a hill and, of course, once the car got rolling it was less easy to stop than I'd thought and I lost control of it and had visions of it going all the way down the hill and destroying itself and probably hitting children or the elderly or something.
Thankfully it settled out harmlessly in a trough halfway down and no one seems to have seen me as I got in a drove away.
I coasted on that experience for a long time. When I was having a bad day I'd think of the BMW not getting wrecked and no one being killed and whatever was going wrong didn't seem so bad all of a sudden.
But after that I found I liked walking better. Even in extreme cold I walk if it's manageable and I hope this sets at rest some uncertainly you were having about what I'm like.
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