THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502220538
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
My suspicions of the rental car arose right off when the handle on the car's front door proved to have been put on backwards.
Wouldn't you think somebody on the assembly line at Willow Run, if Willow Run were still in operation, would have noticed an oversight like that?
A helluva thing!
Can you feature it?
The line is running, turning `em out, fifty cars a minute. Suddenly:
``HEY, MEN! HOLD UP! WE'RE PUTTING THE DAMN HANDLES ON BACKWARDS! REVERSE THE LINE!
STAND BACK, EVERYBODY! HERE THEY COME!
Actually, it couldn't have been done at Willow Run. It was, as I recall, a foreign make.
Apparently they were all too busy tinkering with the electronic maze under the hood.
The opening into which you reached to grasp the handle was at the front, unexpectedly, toward the engine, instead of at the rear of the handle where you would naturally take hold of it - forehanded, as if grasping a tennis racket for the serve.
You practically had to approach the handle back-handed, like Don Budge, who had the best backhand ever. They ought to name that type of handle the Budge.
Maybe the designers arranged it that way on purpose.
There they were at the drawing board, trying to come up with something different and daring, until finally somebody said:
``Hey, fellows, I've got it! Why don't we put the handle on backwards? That'll start them talking!''
Anyway, all day, reaching for the handle, my hand was frabbing away, slapping the side of the door without being able to get a grip, until it dawned on me, anew, about the misplaced handle.
You know, just this minute while writing, it comes to me, in a great light, that the handle must have been contrived for left-handed drivers, custom made for lefties as envisioned by the greatest southpaw of them all, Leonardo da Vinci.
You can, no doubt, find it somewhere in those fabulous sketches of da Vinci's inventions, the left-handed handle.
The car's radio offered further challenges. Its intricacies - a word on which you have to hop, skip and jump swiftly to pronounce - would have baffled Einstein.
The radio control panel offered more than a dozen geegaws and protuberances to be pushed or pulled, three banks of them.
I didn't even try to turn on the radio.
But most difficult of all to operate on the car was the cap to the gas tank - on the wrong side of the car, on the driver's side, just the opposite of its location on my old convertible.
Do you know something? There's no space left to take care of what was to have been the main burden of this piece, with a truly startling conclusion. Ah, well, we'll get back to it, one day. I promise. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGNESSY/Staff
by CNB