Take James May’s Car Bore Quiz
I’m a car person, you’re a car person, many of your/my friends are car people, and our spouses may even be car people. What that means is that every other person in our lives (I’m willing to bet the vast majority) are not car people and probably see cars as nothing more than a hunk of metal, plastic, and electronics to get you to and work. To a non car person, the automobile is no different than a toilet bowl brush; it’s useful when you need it, but otherwise it sits tucked away somewhere out of the way.
As gearheads, you and I know all too well when you’re hanging out with your non car buddies, and an Aston Martin DBS drives by, and you trail off mid-sentence with a spittle of drool dangling out of your mouth, your neck craning to catch that one last glimpse of the beautiful work of art that just drove by. You turn to your friends, eyes ablaze with excitement, and ask “Did you SEE that??” The response you get is an eye roll, a raised eyebrow, and “….see what?” That’s right, you remind yourself; I’m in the company of non car people. What a shame.
Or worse, you’re the one with an actual car that you love, whether it’s your project car or just the car you’ve wanted forever, and all you want to talk about are the new coilovers you installed or how much better your car performs after getting a tune, but you have no one to gush over all that stuff with. You try to bring it up in coversation, but as soon as you do, you can see people adopting the “thousand yard stare” and immediately start zoning out. Or as a former friend of mine once said to another friend regarding a mutual car person we knew as said car person was taking a pic of his baby: “What horrible thing do you suppose happened to his penis?”
I’ve rambled on long enough. The point is as a gearhead, at some point in your car loving life, you were the most boring part of a conversation. I know I often am, as my wife and pretty much all my neighbors do not give a rat’s butt about cars. At some point, probably more often than not, you were a major bore, the one people sometimes avoided because they knew inevitably talking to you eventually meant talking about cars.
Basically at some point, we have all felt like James May.
Oh trust me, James knows this as well, which is why he put up a short quiz on his DriveTribe page, aptly titled “How Much Of a Car Bore Are You?” Go ahead and take the quiz; it’s super short and rather entertaining. Let’s find out how boring we all are to the non car people in our lives!
By the way, I am 90% boring.
