Traffic School
The morning of the traffic school rolls around and am I dreading it. It's well below freezing, we even got a little snow. Of course the worst thing is that I know I'm not going to learn anything. I going to spend the next five hours learning how to use my seat belt, my blinker, and maybe, just maybe, if we are really fast learners, we might learn how to make a proper left hand turn. After that I've got another hour sitting in a class room watching movies of dead people who had not observed proper safety procedures. What a waste of
time.
While waiting for the class to start I was chatting with Jessica, one of the other people who had to endure this punishment. A busted tail light... she had to take traffic school because she had a broken tail light. What kind of world is this where they make you take traffic school because your tail light is broken? I was just about to complain when I thought over my situation. The same kind of world that would make me take traffic school for having a 'broken windshield wiper'.
The class started and as I had feared we started off driving at 15 miles per hour around a large parking lot learning how to make right hand turns and lane changes. Even worse than that... I learned how bad of a driver I really am. No, I didn't hit any cones or miss a turn or anything like that. Here we all are driving single file down a row of cones and I'm getting bored. The person in front of me was going to slow and when they went into one of the lane changing areas... I sped up and passed him. I can't believe I passed him... in a parking lot, surrounded by cones meant to keep us conforming to one path. Amazingly I didn't hit any cones.
Much to my surprise, the class became much more interesting after that. We soon moved onto the fun driving exercises, such as threshold breaking and the skid pad. The skid pad is where you accelerate as fast as you can out onto a wet patch of road and then throw your emergency brake. The object is to try to retain control of the vehicle while sliding 100 feet sideways. The unofficial goal was to be the first to get your car to do a 360 which despite my best efforts I was unable to achieve. Another fun test was the accident avoidance. Again we would accelerate as fast as we could towards a line of cones (representing a stopped car) and at the last moment, try to break and turn into a different lane (without locking the brakes or skidding). Unfortunately this one was done with two cars on the track at a time, the second car would start the track when the first car hit the midway point of the track. I would slide through about 40-50 miles per hour while the cars in front of me would do it at 20-25 miles per hour and I would always (without fail) have to stop near the end of the track because I'd catch up with the car in front of me.
The Slalom was next. The instructor made the mistake of telling us that it was almost impossible to do faster than 20 miles per hour so Jessica and I, decided to take it upon ourselves to prove him wrong. My first try I managed to get 35 miles per hour but ended up having to slow down to about 20 in order not to hit 2 cones at the turn. My second attempt I had to do better because Jessica made the track at 25 with no errors. Again I tried to keep it at 35 and this time totally killed a cone that went straight under my tire.... Again, Jessica made it through at 28 with one cone hit but none knocked over. This was my last try before having to go to the class room portion and I couldn't let her beat me. I settled for trying it at 32 and made it through perfectly, not a single cone touched and I did it 50% faster than the instructor said I could. I was happy. Jessica went last and beat me by 2 mph... sigh...
The weird part is that I thought this class was supposed to teach us how to be safer drivers. Instead I left knowing that I could drive faster and make turns sharper than I thought I could, and I had fun doing it.
Again, if you didn't believe me last time, I strongly recommend getting pulled over for speeding...