I feel like many times when I meet someone new, after a few moments of talking to me, their most lasting impression is amazement that I’m permitted to use implements like forks without a colossal amount of supervision. This could be related to why I find certain things funny, like the improper use of ordinal numbers in English’s admittedly weird system. You know, things like seeing 1nd (firnd) or 3st (thirst) instead of 1st (first) or 3rd (third). I don’t know why this cracks me up, but it does.
Anyway, just because these stupid things crack me up, and I wouldn’t stop typing 5st and 7rd in Slack, it was suggested maybe I could make some shift knobs with this sort of crap on them. That’s a great idea!
I mean, I get that almost no shift knobs have 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.—they just have numbers—but still.
So, just in the off, off chance you find this bullshit as amusing as I do, here’s some graphics you could, hypothetically, print onto some manner of durable decal and use as your very own shift knob pattern!
Here’s one for you archaic four-speed drivers:
...and, why not, one for Beetle/old air-cooled Porsche layouts with reverse by seconerd, too:
I think this five-speed layout is the most common type:
A six-speed one for you modern bigshots:
...and another six-speed:
And, since we’re Jalopnik, after all, a three-speed one:
There you go. Maybe someone will actually use one of these? Maybe you can be the firth one of your friends to have one and start a trend!