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The last week has been a bit of a pain.

To start with I’ve had nearly 50 hours of lessons, which is great. But during this time my computer started to play up (separate thread about that) and I’ve been trying to fix it using what little time I have had available.

Anyway, last Tuesday (10/03/09) I had a nice pass (well done DL) – she has just been moved to Birmingham by her employer and needed to be able to commute.

Then yesterday there was another pass (well done VKC) with just 2 driver faults. This lad is my quickest pass ever in just 23 hours (no private practice, but his dad had shown him how to drive before he came to me).

There was one slight aberration – one lad failed this week for a silly lapse in concentration and was angry with himself. In his own words:

“It was my fault, and if I’d have remembered I’d be sitting here with a pass right now”.

All of them are great drivers and fully deserve to be out there on the roads (I add that because I know there will be one or two instructors out there who, when they read this, will automatically be looking for negatives by trying to read into what I have written. The industry is full of that sort, I’m afraid).

Just watching Breakfast News on the BBC and I was taken aback to see ” Grow Your Own Drugs ” on the rear-screen displays behind the presenters and some guy they’re interviewing (big grin, looks like a Blue Peter presenter).

It’s a very unfortunate tagline for a new BBC programme about plants you can grow at home which have medicinal properties.

Listening to the last part of it, the show is likely to be a thinly disguised ‘alternative medicine’ love-in, because he’s going on about aromatherapy ingredients at the moment. And I can’t see the Beeb showing people how to make Aspirin from Willow Tree bark.

The BBC site confirms it will be extremely lightweight, and witters on about making ‘some pampering beauty treatments ‘. But from the dumbing-down specialists, what would you expect?

EDIT 3/3/2009 – And so it was lightweight. Facepacks, the astounding news that Figs and Senna ‘make you regular’, the repeated comment that this berry or than root ‘is thought to be good for’ something or other, and so on.

Alfa Romeo MiTo.

I don’t have to say anything – just listen to the bit where it keeps saying ‘technologic’ in a squeaky voice (sounds like ‘technology’ with an idiot saying it). It drives me nuts and on Sky they show it at the start, end, and in the middle (I think) of every ad break.

I came across this the other day – it’s the Driving Examiners’ Branch of the Public Services Union (PCS).

As you meander your way through life, some things pass you by. Other things attract your attention. And a few things grab you by the throat and shake you. This website falls easily into that latter class as far as my own wander through life is concerned.

The first thing anyone clicking on the link will be struck by is the viciousness of the main story towards the employer of the members of this group. As I write this, the front page story is proclaiming that it is ‘the voice of reason in the double standards agency’ (for anyone not in the know, ‘double standards agency’ is the name people of restricted intelligence give to the DSA (Driving Standards Agency) – but it stopped being clever or funny shortly after the first time it was used many, many years ago. Actually, around the second or third time – but that’s not important).

But back to the main topic. If you click on ‘ Advice to Test Candidates ‘ on the site you get a very superior lecture on what to do when you go for your test:

You!

Make sure you read your appointment letter fully, there is valuable information in it.
Make sure you are well prepared and ready for the test, your Examiner will know very soon if you are not, and may terminate the test.
Remember to read and know the Highway Code and follow its advice, it is not just to get you through the Theory Test.

When you attend for your test, you should be :-

• in possession of all the correct documentation
• courteous

When you attend for your test, you should not be :-

verbally or physically abusive to your examiner

• obviously ill
• suffering form an infectious disease
• verbally or physically abusive to your examiner

Gosh! No need for us instructors with people like this guy around, is there? You get the distinct impression of a uniformed, jack-booted neanderthal delivering this advice – and it’s not the kind of approach that is customer-focused or sympathetic to the candidate, is it?

Click on ‘ Dumbing Down The Driving Test ‘ and you get an inkling of the minds involved in this site and their motives (articles are written by more than one person, you would imagine):

I have been saying in my office for a long time, the problem is outside with the instructors,[FULL STOP, CAPITAL ‘W’]  we are checked a minimum of 6 times a year, [BUT] some instructors are going 3 or 4 YEARS with out a check and even then, when found to be sub standard, the agency get in a higher manager who can see no reason why not to allow them to continue,[FULL STOP, CAPITAL H]  how many instructors have been taken off the register in the past year?

I can make a good guess that any errant spelling has been corrected, but I have taken the liberty and corrected errant grammar (green additions in brackets) so that the paragraph makes sense. If certain examiners feel like this about instructors then we’re always going to have a problem, aren’t we?

But this is the best bit – after more superior advice to candidates it offers a list of example infectious diseases which you should not turn up for your test with:

• Acute Encephalitis
• Acute Poliomyelitis
• Anthrax
• Chicken-Pox (Varicella)
• Cholera
• Diphtheria
• Dysentery (amoebic or bacillary)
• Food Poisoning
• Glandular Fever (Infective mononucleosis)
• Infective Jaundice
• Influenza
• Lassa Fever
• Legionnaires’ Disease
• Leprosy
• Leptospirosis
• Malaria
• Marburg Disease
• Measles
• Meningitis
• Meningococcal Septicaemia (without meningitis)
• Mumps
• Ophthalmia Neonatorum
• Paratyphoid Fever
• Plague
• Rabies
• Relapsing Fever
• Rubella
• Scarlet Fever
• Shingles (Herpes Zoster)
• Smallpox
• Syphilis
• Tetanus
• Tonsillitis
• Tuberculosis
• Typhus
• Viral Haemorrhagic Fever
• Whooping Cough
• Yellow Fever

All of the above are highly contagious;
Those highlighted in red are the ones we have been told about at centres this year!!!!

 

Plague? I guess there must be a lot of that, so well worth the warning. And Rabies? Well, you can’t be too careful. Leprosy? (Driving Examiner: “Excuse me, but is this your finger I just found on the floor?”) Marburg Disease and Lassa Fever are both exceedingly rare. There have only been 12 cases of Lassa in the UK since 1970, and none of Marburg. So whoever published the information on this website is obviously right to be worried! And Anthrax? Stupid! I never thought of that. I mean, it’s everywhere, isn’t it?

To be fair, they do say the red ones are those reported this year, but it obviously reads like the author is afraid of candidates who might be carrying the other ones. And I’d love to know how they accurately diagnosed some of those – maybe they have a lab, now? (Pupil who simply doesn’t feel well: “I’ve got food poisoning/flu/tonsillitis”).

In actual fact, I think whoever wrote this – or should I say, Googled it and then copied and pasted it – didn’t know the difference in meaning between the words ‘infectious’ and ‘contagious’. What business is it of the examiner if someone has Malaria? You can’t catch it off people (and that’s the only thing they’re worried about on this site – not the test candidate). And there are a few others on there which aren’t actually contagious – even Leprosy is less contagious than, say, HIV, and I’d love to see them publicly discriminate against people who are HIV-positive.

Yes, a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing when in the wrong hands.

I must point out that all the examiners I know from my available test centres are courteous and polite to both candidates and instructors (something which can’t be said of all instructors). I also know that these examiners appear to work through any of the frequent industrial action (i.e. pay disputes), so it’s safe to guess they didn’t write any of this rubbish.

Last week I had a pupil on test. It was her third attempt.

Before Christmas she failed on one thing (parallel park). The examiner said to her at the end: ” I’m really sorry to do this, it was a perfect drive, but you just need to practice that manoeuvre a little bit more “. She does it perfectly every time on lessons.

On her second attempt just after Christmas she went to pieces even before the test. She was in tears on the way to the test centre. In the end she failed for missing an observation when doing the turn in the road. It was near the end of the test and she told me she’d given up because she knew she’s failed. The problem is she hadn’t – and it was only the error on the manoeuvre that caused the fail.

This third time she failed on parallel park again. The examiner said to her: ” You’re a good driver and I want you to put in for your test straight away. You just need to get your nerves under control “.

But this is where it got interesting. I looked at her result sheet and saw the fault. I pointed out she had only failed on the parallel park. She then called her sister and mum to tell them she’d failed.

When talking to her sister she said ” my instructor doesn’t know this, but I bumped the kerb and the examiner asked me if I wanted to correct it, and I said ‘no’ “.

When she’d finished the call I explained that this was a lifeline and if she had have corrected it she would have passed. She acted surprised at this, and I found that surprising. But as we drove back home it became a little clearer what she was hiding from me: the examiner had actually told her in the car at the end that if she’d have corrected it he would have passed her . What had happened is that she’d spit her dummy out, she knew it, and she was trying not to admit it – and I made certain she realised that she’d thrown away a pass as a result!

I could kill them sometimes.

This is an intriguing story in The Sun. OK, so it’s just The Sun shovelling stuff on after that UFO In The Turbine debacle a few weeks ago, but at least this one has what appears to be hard facts backing it up.

Basically, on Google Ocean there is a patch of sea floor which has a well-defined layout remarkably reminiscent of a city. It is apparently about the size of Wales.

The Telegraph covers the same story better.

toronstganymede – someone who has posted a comment about the story in The Sun – sagely advises us:

… it’s an abandoned undersea ufo base – it was only a few fathoms down before the last polar shift – atlantis is off the coast of cuba …

I strongly advise you to read some of the other comments. Most of the posters are total nuts!

To put it in perspective, there is a follow-up story which quashes the Atlantis theory. I doubt The Sun (or its readers) will worry too much about these particular facts, though.

I must confess that I’m not 100% convinced over the official explanation about it being mapping lines. I accept that it could be, but it definitely looks like something actually on the ocean floor and those lines are very straight. Perhaps if more ‘underwater cities’ were found, mapping lines would be a better explanation.

But I won’t lose any sleep over it. It’s just an interesting story, that’s all.

EDIT: 21/02/2009 – Actually, having had a look at Google Ocean myself, there are quite a few linear traces which cannot possibly be natural (including in the Pacific), but which are equally not man-made. At least, not in the sense you’d call a house or a city ‘man-made’. The anomaly reported in the press does look particularly ‘man-made’, and I haven’t found anything quite that obvious, but there are more anomalies to the east of it.

I’m still keeping an open mind.

Well, it didn’t take long for them to sort that out. Scottish courts, eh?

I noted a couple of days ago that a driving examiner was suing a pupil for an injury he claimed he sustained during her driving test. And he has won ( BBC News story here).

I noticed that a lot of instructors are up in arms over the case, with calls to boycott the test centre the examiner works at. It is clear that they don’t realise this case was between the examiner and the pupil’s insurance company (not the DSA and the insurance co.)

Personally, I can’t get worked up over it. The pupil was clearly a danger on the road that day – it is more worrying that some pupils of this standard actually pass their tests, and then the rest of us are pitted against them every day as they suddenly decide they’re better than everyone else by virtue of age and ‘chaviness’, and work tirelessly towards removing themselves from the gene pool at the earliest opportunity.

In any case, the examiner hasn’t been awarded damages yet. He’s claiming £15,000 but he could actually get nothing (though I think he’ll at least get something)

Saw this in the Daily Mail today – a Driving Examiner is suing a pupil who allegedly caused him to suffer whiplash on a test. The same story is also covered by the BBC.

It’s a hard one to work out. On the one hand, someone going to test who uses their left foot to brake makes you sit back and think ‘Hmmmm!’  (and when she says she ‘wouldn’t have made the same mistake again’, you know this is tosh because if she panicked enough to do it once she’d not be able to avoid doing it again). But on the other hand, the fact that it seems the examiner has raised two other claims for accidents he’s apparently been involved in (you assume whilst carrying out his job) also makes you wonder about him.

There’s some strange people involved in this game – on both sides of the fence.

EDIT 20/02/2009: See latest news on this here .

Last week – after the heavy snow we’d had – I was going to meet a pupil and I’d stopped on a country lane to make a phone call. The road in question is a single track one, and I was in a field gateway, well off the road. The road had compacted ice on it on this stretch and although the snow was almost gone, it was frozen solid after a hard frost.

I heard a car coming. As it  appeared around the corner doing at least 30mph – on compacted ice, remember – the driver lost control and slammed on his brakes. There was a look of sheer terror in his eyes as he skidded off the road, on to the grass, and narrowly avoided going into a ditch. He came to a halt, and then had difficulty in getting off the grass as he was in 1st gear and his wheels were spinning. His face was as red as his car. As he then reversed it was clear his front bumper had been smashed.

It is relevant to note that the driver was a young man, and his car was a Vauxhall Corsa…

Almost everyone gets caught out in this country when it snows. But young people are frighteningly naive (and I base that largely on what I’ve seen during the last couple of weeks).

The snow we’ve had has provided an ideal opportunity to take some learners out. I stress the word ‘some’ – there’s no way a beginner or early-stage learner should be taken out in extreme conditions such as those we’ve experienced. I know some instructors will disagree (mainly because they didn’t want to lose money), but these video clips illustrate why driving on snow requires the utmost care – something learners and most ‘qualified’ drivers are quite capable of not realising until it’s too late!

This one shows how easy it is to get moving – and not be able to stop – without even taking your handbrake off!

Incidentally, until as late as last Friday there was a hill near me on which you could stop using the footbrake (if you went slowly), but on which you slid forward under the force of gravity when you secured the car using the handbrake. It was necessary to ‘chock’ yourself against the kerb. So no arguments about how ‘that’s not in the UK, though’!

This one shows conditions (and driving behaviour) which was experienced throughout the UK for a whole week last week.

And in this one, the speed those drivers are doing is insane considering the conditions. Again, don’t say this is not like in the UK – after the weather we’ve had this year this is exactly like the UK. And the speed problem is as real, too: that’s why people crash in snow and ice – they’re going too fast!

Quite simply, accidents in snow are caused by:

• going too fast
• braking too hard
• accelerating too much
• being naive or foolish

You don’t meet many young people who will admit that they don’t know everything in the Universe (and some older people are as bad). So accidents are a given.

Oooo. Like we didn’t already know that!

There’s an article in The Register which discusses which words are searched for most via Ask.com . It points out:

…that Brits find “accommodation” the most challenging.

That’s according to Ask.com, which also fingered “accessory”, “guarantee” and “opportunity” as hot faves for correction plus, natch, “embarrass”. Also on the list of shame were “restaurant” and “February”, while “hundreds of people are also confused by the letter order of eighth and the silent ‘p’ in ‘receipt'”, as the Telegraph puts it.

Why is this happening?

Yup, you guessed it: Text speak, reliance on spellcheckers and general bone idleness are about to consign our beloved mother lingo to orthographical oblivion.

The standards of spelling and grammar these days are appalling. An additional problem, in my opinion, is the almost mandatory approach to bad spelling: ignore it and don’t identify it as a fault, because you might upset someone. The best examples of this come from annual stories about exam marking. This one is from The Times Online.

A head teacher is refusing to publish the results of some national curriculum tests after discovering such poor marking that pupils who performed strongly fared worse than poor students.

Child A wrote about Pip Davenport, a fairground inventor: “If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And had stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides.

“Becoues he invented a lot of new rides he won a prize. He didn’t live with his mum he lived with his wife.**

This received one mark more than Child B who wrote: “Quickly, it became apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural. But it was his love of horses that led to a tragic accident. An accident that would change his life forever.

It reminds me of that recent buzz about aliens that The Sun was into. I’m sure aliens already walk amongst us – and some of them mark exam papers.

I’d just like to point out any spelling mistakes in this blog are actually typos – not mistakes. I don’t use a spellchecker, but I do proofread posts myself.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.