Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, you feel like you're going backwards? When you find yourself in that place, sometimes it's best to have a 'glass half full' approach and look at things from a positive perspective. Sometimes going backwards has benefits. But other times, by sheer will, you have to say, "I'm not going backwards any more!" Today I have a story for you that illustrates this.
Back in 2001 I had a pickup truck. It was the pickup truck of my dreams. I loved that truck! I purchased it used from a gentleman that ran the Texaco bulk plant in my hometown. It was a 1995 GMC 4x4 with dual exhausts. The old gal sounded great when you'd rev her up. It was (to me anyway) a good looking truck and it had all the power I needed to get the work done. I was farming and I transported many tons of crawfish to market in that old truck. One bad thing about it was the gas mileage. I got around 12 miles to the gallon. The farm was 30 miles away from home so I spent a lot of money filling up this thirsty truck. She looked very much like this:
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Farming was tough. I absolutely LOVED farming, but it was very hard to make ends meet. The price that you could get for your rice and the cost of inputs to grow it were inversely proportional. When you needed rain, it didn't come and when you needed it to dry up, it would rain every day. I tried to diversify with crawfish and the price of crawfish would drop. Seems like you couldn't win for losing!
Long about that time, my beloved pickup truck started acting up. The transmission would slip. It would make funny noises. I was hoping for an easy fix, but there was plenty of transmission fluid in the transmission. Pro Tip: I learned that if you ignore things like this, the problem just doesn't go away.
Pretty soon, I could not go into reverse. Oh, I could shift it into "R," but it did absolutely nothing. I drove it to a transmission shop and they diagnosed the problem - my truck had a burnt reverse band in the transmission. I would need a new transmission. The cost of a new one was $1,800. That's a lot of rice and crawfish> Needless to say, I had sticker shock. I needed to think about it. I didn't want to make a hasty decision.
I drove off and thought about it. My first thought was this: "I'm still driving, aren't I? Who needs reverse anyway?" My wife will attest to the fact that I can be pretty hard-headed at times. This was one of those times. My mind was made. I drove that pickup truck every single day for the next 6 months with no reverse while I saved money to fund a the purchase of a transmission! Seriously.
Driving Ol' Whitey became like a game or a puzzle and required fore-thought and planning at all times. No more flying by the seat of your pants. Every driving decision had to be made with keen mental acuity. I no longer parked in the garage. That wouldn't do. I parked on the horseshoe drive. When shopping, I never pulled up to the parking bumpers. I always parked far out in the parking lot where I could just drive forward, make a loop, and head out. Driving became a strategic exercise.
I only got myself in trouble one or two times when I either forgot about my truck's disability or someone pulled in front of me and left me no means of egress. But that was not a problem without a solution. I merely cranked the truck, put it in neutral, jumped out and pushed the truck backwards enough to allow me to turn around, and boom - I was good to go. I smile when I look backward at the time when I couldn't drive that way!
"Never look back unless you're planning to go that way." - Henry David Thoreau
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