The Driving Test

I was a dick, too

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My driver training instructor was a dick.

And I was kind of grateful for that, because him being a dick is why I passed my driver’s test the first time. And I could not fucking wait to get that freedom. Things were different in the 80s. Home sucked, what with its 13 channels of shit, no internet, and Coleco Head-to-Head Football and Pong as the leading edge of electronic gaming.

In Alberta, you could get your learner’s license at fourteen. My parents were workaholics and there was no encouragement to do … anything. I stopped showing them my report card when I was twelve, and they never asked. At fourteen I took the bus to the Motor Vehicles Branch (the Canadian version of the DMV) to get the book to study for the learner’s exam, which was a multiple-choice test done on a “computer.”

I studied pretty hard, but I wasn’t a great student. I especially sucked at multiple choice. I always fell for the traps. Like, when an answer was provided that they made seem logical, where they were trying to convince you to “pick this one!”, I often fell for it.

So, yeah. I failed the first time.

But I learned one thing, which is don’t fall for the fake answer, like when they try to make it reasonable that in these very special circumstances it’s okay to go over the speed limit just a little bit, for just a moment. Nope. That’s a fucking trick. As far as those fuckers were concerned, it was never okay to speed by even 1 kilometer per hour.

I studied some more, took the bus down to the MVB yet again, and passed the second time around. Then I pestered my parents to let me drive whenever I could, but again, they were workaholics so there weren’t a lot of opportunities.

The first time I was behind the wheel of a vehicle I was twelve. I was visiting my dad in northern British Columbia, and he had a beat-up old Ford truck that was a four-speed manual. Driving manual when you’ve never driven before is an adventure. We were on a quiet gravel road, and I even managed to get it into second gear.

As I approached sixteen, I again had to take charge myself, arranging for my own driver training course. My parents paid for it, but it was all on me to do the booking, as well as taking the bus to the classes. After the classes were done I met my instructor. He had a cop moustache. He might have been a former cop or maybe wanted to be one and didn’t make it and had an axe to grind. As I said, he was a dick.

Within a couple of minutes he said, “What’s the speed limit here?”

“Fifty,” I replied.