On Sunday, police in Paducah, Kentucky arrested a woman who stole a car. Normally, that wouldn’t be something worth reporting on outside of Paducah. It’s unfortunate, but people steal cars all the time. And since the car she stole was reported to be a “2001 Toyota,” we highly doubt that the car she stole was notably rare or valuable. But the reason she gave the police almost gets us there. Apparently, “she was tired of walking.”
Look, we’ve all been there. Sometimes you really just don’t want to walk anymore, and it’s not like most of the U.S. is designed for people. Arguably, most of the U.S. is set up for people to drive and park their cars. People without cars are just an afterthought. We just don’t steal someone’s car to get out of that situation.
But the story only gets weirder from there. She was arrested at about 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. Can you guess what she was doing a little before 1:00 p.m. that same day? If you guessed “getting arrested for trying to steal a different car in the Walmart parking lot” then please come to the front to claim your prize.
The owner of the truck told police that he was loading groceries into the back with the truck, and his wife was already sitting in the passenger seat, so they had the car on. Which is fine. You probably wouldn’t want to sit in a hot car during a Kentucky summer, either. Apparently, our attempted car thief “got into the driver’s seat of the truck and told the woman to get out, because the truck belonged to her.”
She then attempted to drive away but wasn’t able to put the car into gear. Saved once again by a manual transmission, the ultimate car theft deterrent, right? Except the truck that she tried to steal is described as a “2016 Dodge pickup truck.” (It’s only been 13 years since Ram became its own brand, and you’d think more people would know that by now, but that’s not really the point.) Unless it was a rare Ram 2500 with a manual transmission, what’s much more likely is that she was defeated by the truck’s rotary shift knob.
People have complained that those things are confusing for years, and we’ve generally brushed it off because it’s really not that hard to understand. But maybe we were wrong. Maybe the second-best theft deterrent after a manual is actually a rotary shift knob.