On a school trip to London
I'd managed to claim the back seat of the minibus with my friends.

As we approached the Science Museum, my teacher spotted a reasonably convenient parking space. However, unfamiliar as he was with driving a minibus, he struggled to cope with the size of the vehicle, the reduced visbility and the weight of the steering at low speeds.

After a couple of aborted attempts to maneuver into the space I can only assume he was starting to lose patience and had decided to try a variation of the courier driver's trick for quick parallel parking.

Now the courier's trick is to drive forward into a space at a sharp angle and when the nearside front wheel has gone up onto the pavement turn the steering wheel quickly so that the vehicle straightens out into the space, with the wheel dropping back onto the street.

My teacher decided to try this technique, but instead chose to reverse into the space. As this would result in one of the rear wheels going up onto the pavement and since rear visiblity was so restricted he called out for assistance:
"Someone look out the back and tell me if there's anything in the way."

I dutifully looked out of the rear window and responded:
"There's a couple of meters behind us."

I can only guess that my teacher was glowing with pride that one of his pupils had so readily embraced metrification as he reversed and, as the rear wheel mounted the pavement, came to an abrupt halt as the back of the bus struck the two parking meters that I had been trying to warn him about.

Much hilarity ensued over his misunderstanding of the difference between two metres and two meters!
(SpittyWoonerism, Sun 9 Oct 2005, 10:30, Reply)