For some reason I cannot get the Green Day song ‘American Idiot‘ out of my head. I have loved this song since I saw the pure energy of their Live-8 performance in 2005. It hass a catching musical riff, and memorable lyrics… or at least the chorus is memorable… How could you not sing along with the following lyrics :-
Don’t wanna be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria,
Calling out to idiot America

A week or two back I was looking through some Sydney Olympics photos, and found one that I had totally forgotten about. I was working for an American company during the Olympics. Our team had three or four broadcast vans, a motorcycle trailer, and four motorcycles. Each of these were imported from the USA for the Olympics. And most had Pensylvania number plates on them (apart from the one which had a plate stolen at the Sydney wharves).

Anyway, all these vehicles were left hand drive… Maybe not the motorcycles, but anything with a steeting wheel had it on the wrong side of the vehicle. So for the Olympics, our vehicles were given ‘Unregistered Vehicle’ registration papers which is apparently normal. There was no requirement to do anything with our vehicles except drive them like normal.

But one of the team members decided that this would not be ‘Legal’, and decided to ‘fix’ the car. He decided that the van needed a right hand side steering wheel… So bought a steering wheel cover from K-Mart, and duct taped it to the dash. This worked well…

Except for one minor problem. The person on the right hand side was being driven through traffic and they were pulled over by the police for using a cellphone whilst driving. This is illegal in NSW without a car kit. Anyway, they were pulled over, and the police officer started telling the passenger off for using a cellphone, and was about to give them a ticket before he realised that the steering wheel did not move. Being embarrased and not ready to admit this, he then quickly appologised and reminded them not to drive whilst using a cellphone!