Saturday, October 26, 2024

Hard Night at the Office

I dreamed I was selling cars again, which was weird, because it's been thirty-five years since I worked at a car dealership.

In the dream the dealership didn't have a showroom, but rather a big open-plan office with low-walled cubicles. I had this young just-married couple looking to buy a car and they very specifically wanted a manual transmission. We test drove something like a mid-Eighties Camry with a four-cylinder and a five speed, and some imaginary dream coupe that looked something like an MX-6 but was made by some imaginary French company that only existed in my dream world.

I got off into some interminable nerdy explanation to them about the synchros, and then about the differences between straight-cut and helical-cut gears, using a couple file folders to mime how the gear teeth meshed.

There were hundreds of cars on the lot but only three had manual transmissions and I was trying to find the third one in the computer, but we hot-desked in these little cubicles and whoever had used this one last had played a browser game that left always-on-top pop-up windows all over the desktop, obscuring our sales software.

I was trying to explain to the dude, who was the one insisting on a manual, that there was no real performance advantage to a manual and it would make for a more tedious commute in traffic, but then I woke up.




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