How long does it take to learn to drive?
In time since I have learned to drive I feel I have accomplished a lot and yet I will go out of my way to avoid having to parallel park because I feel like its always going to be my Achilles heel. At least I have come a long way from the days when I used to feel anxious about getting into my car and was likely to bunny hop across roundabouts in third gear. The problem with learning to drive is that the older you do the harder it is and I waited until I was twenty eight before deciding it was a necessity. I was much more cautious and anxious than your average seventeen year old heading out and I am pretty sure my initial journeys in the car were probably fairly harrowing for the brave folks who agreed to be my passengers. My mother was not one of those people although surely now that I will be investing in N plates she will surely have to take a chance on my driving skills.
One of the things they do now when you go to renew your provisional driving licence is that they pretty much force you to apply for a full driving test every time you licence comes up for renewal. It's pretty smart when you think about it because unless I was forced into it, I am certain I would put it off indefinitely and keep updating my provisional licence until I was told I couldn't. Really for me it makes more sense for me to have a full licence. I can get different shifts within work just by having a full licence, there's a whole list of social care jobs I couldn't even apply for just because I was a 'learner' driver and of course my insurance will go down. All pluses that were overshadowed by my fear of doing the actual test. I had last done it 3 years ago when I had only been driving a year, a nerve wracking experience by all accounts and I had done rather badly at it which made me less than eager to repeat the experience.
Anyway the lovely folks at the RSA forced my hand and I resolved to take the first date they gave me but alas it when I was away in Belgium. I then told myself I would definitely take the next date offered and low and behold it was Christmas week. I wasn't keen to do my driving test so close to Christmas but I was thinking of my car insurance which I will be renewing in January so I decided to be an adult and accept the date.
In the time between getting the date and today I took four driving lessons. Its probably the only reason I passed at all. We did all the test routes and he gently reminded every time I did something that would lose me marks in the actual test which was a lot. My last lesson which was this morning was the hardest of all. I was so nervous I felt ill and I kept making mistakes plus some idiot nearly drove into the front of my car. By the time I was sitting in the office with my tester I was visibly shaking as I signed my name. I was so worked up I am surprised I remembered how to drive. I moved my head so much I'd say I looked a bit mad. I made one or two smallish mistakes that had me convinced I had definitely failed so I just focused on getting the rest of the test over with and not knocking down a pedestrian ( that actually happened to a guy doing his test in Dublin, true story. The pedestrian was fine, thankfully) and I think there was even a minute where I forgot I was still doing my test. I don't think spacing out is recommended while doing your driving test.
I have never been so glad to finish up a test ever. I headed back into the test centre waiting to hear that sadly I had failed but instead he said I'd passed. After he listed things I had done wrong on the test mostly due to severe nervousness but I didn't hear them because I passed. I just nodded politely and agreed to work on those things before skipping out of there. So that's it, I will never have to do my driving test again. Plus other great stuff will happen as a result of this. I just don't know what it is yet.
Comments
Post a Comment