Remember a couple of years ago, when some poor bastard decided to get a tattoo of a manual transmission shift pattern, and ended up with something that just permanently demonstrated they had never actually driven anything with a manual transmission? That was pretty embarrassing, but, you know, at least that guy wasn’t a huge nationwide chain of auto repair shops, because, man, if that happened to some organization like that, hoo, that would be really embarrassing! Hey, lemme see how much an alignment is at my local Firestone Complete Auto Care center and — uh oh.
Yes, thanks to the eagle-eyes of a reader named Eric, we now know that whoever made the icons for Firestone Complete Auto Care’s website has no idea how a manual transmission works.
Yes, right there in the Auto Maintenance pull-down menu, we see it: the H-pattern of Shame, the sort-of-logically-but-entirely-wrong method of guessing at how a manual transmission shift pattern works that can only be produced by someone completely unfamiliar with one at all.
I was going to reach out to Firestone for comment, but, really, what are they going to say? It’s a minor error for them at best, I’m sure they barely care, but to gearhead geeks like us, it’s pretty hilarious.
So, let’s just see how long it takes them to actually notice, if at all. Nobody tell them!