When I read that Porsche is planning to launch a manual edition of the 911 I chocked on my morning Kopi Luwak coffee. I sat there on my Charla dining chair in my fabulously expensive, minimalist designer kitchen and turned to my private chef and said aloud, “HOW SO?”. As I digested my £800 pancake breakfast, I made my way to the drawing-room, one of many rooms in my £5 million pound Virginia Water mansion. It gave me time to think about the impact a manual Porsche 911 will have. And it took me back to a time when I was a manual laborer toiling away for a large city banking institution, just after graduating from Oxford University which I attended despite attaining poor A-Level grades. That’s the wonders of private education for you.
A manual Porsche 911? A manual Porsche 911 is the definition of manual labor and after my experience of white-collar manual labor, I have no intention of ever returning to such a back-breaking way to make a living. A Porsche should be driven and savored with no interruptions. So I will not be investing my time or easily acquired money in a stick shifting 911 because changing gears manually is terribly unnecessarily hard work.
Automatic gearboxes were invented to take the labor out of changing gears, why do you want to change gears all by yourself? Left foot down-right foot up, and shift. With automation, you can just get on with the business of going to a urine-soaked pub and chatting to friends about nothing at all. Automation allows you to multi-task, like pouring a Martini while driving home after a busy day at the office scratching one’s arse.
Even as a motoring journalist I no longer toil away at having to manually write each word, I have a low paid assistant to scribe whatever I speak, that’s automation I can live with. Too many motoring journalists, indeed journalists at large, are out of touch. Journalists need to be more efficient at what they do, they don’t need to tell the truth. A truth-telling journalist is an ideological fantasy practiced in the dark corners of journalism school.
But they (journalists) can never be as good as me or as in-touch with the mood of the public as I am.
Evening all!
