Category - ADI

Test Pass – But Not A Happy One

02/05/2010

In all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never had a genuine bust up with a pupil. Until now.

I had a pupil pass his test the other day. He’d previously failed (a couple of months ago) for not responding to a car behind him when reversing round a corner. At the time, he was adamant he wasn’t going to take the test again and that he was going to drive anyway (he’d already been caught and banned for this previously). He admitted that it was his own fault he’d failed – the car had stopped, but he then paid no further heed to it and it had decided not to wait anymore.

I asked him if the examiner was OK about it, and he said “I could have smacked him one “. It was impossible to reason with him – he turned out to be one of those people who is as rough as bricks, can’t handle failure, and blames other people.

Basically, he can drive. He drives typically of someone with loads of confidence but no finesse. He could not do a single manoeuvre, and he only took three 1 hour lessons with me to that point (I hate acting as a hire car service, and refuse to do it if I can see it coming).

Anyway, before this test he took no further lessons at all. We were running through the manoeuvres before going to the test centre, and on one of them he was doing it totally wrong. I tried to explain how to do it and he snapped “look, you’re doing my f****** head in, I can’t be doing with this “.

At that point, I said “Fine! You’re doing MY f****** head in. I don’t get paid to put up with that kind of behaviour. Do it your own way. ”

For the whole session, he was not looking over his shoulder before moving off, he pulled across three cars at three successive roundabouts, he was driving too slow (last time, it was too fast). And so on.

But he passed with quite a high number of faults (a couple more would have been a fail). I couldn’t believe he got away with four for not looking over his shoulder! And he got several for driving too slow (adequate progress). I can see how the examiner saw him as a confident driver, and I expect that is what did it, but when I have excellent learners fail for a single mistake when they have otherwise been perfect, it does make me a little angry.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticising the examiner. And I’m glad this guy passed simply because I would have refused to give him any further lessons. But it’s a pass that gives me very little pleasure. I just hope I never get another ungrateful little sod like this ever again.

Splitting My Sides

01/05/2010

DOAADI

ADI, Funny

A little bit of inane trivia – but it just stuck in my mind, so I thought I’d mention it.

I just browsed through a certain website frequented by driving instructors (mainly argumentative types) and saw something which nearly gave me a coronary, I laughed so much!

On all web forums, you get “characters”. You get people who are deliberately antagonistic, others who are extremely misguided, and so on. But the most irritating ones on instructor forums are the know-it-alls – particularly when they clearly do not know it all!, No matter what someone else says, these people will always behave as if that person is not quite right, even if they are.

This particular character is rather patronising, and loves to dissect what others have said word by word. He’s never wrong himself, and if challenged will defend anything he has said with post after post of minutiae to support it. He isn’t aware of how annoying he is to others (though it does come out occasionally after they lose their tempers). He often makes matters worse by adding things like “Bill is right”, which usually stirs things up even more.

This particular argument is about elderly drivers, and should they have to be re-tested or not. The part that made me laugh out loud is was:

[Long dissection of someone else’s post who he has been attacking, and who is standing up to him so that an argument is brewing]…

As many readers will know, my posts are generally polite and in the interests of acquiring knowledge or validating opinion or giving out knowledge as opposed to the people on here who cannot debate properly and become quite childish in the way they express themselves when others choose to disagree with them.

I would venture to suggest that if more people followed my example, there would be more people prepared to post on here rather than as they do, not want to get involved through fear of ridicule etc. That would enrich the Forum beyond belief because there are many out there with a lot to give. I’m not saying I’m perfect or never make mistakes but look at my posts since I joined and you will see what I mean.

He likes to point out that life – including driving – isn’t black and white.

To make matters worse, a moderator (and close friend) has defended him, which then geed Mr know-it-all up enough to make a few cutting remarks about the person he’d wound up. He then made some comment about ignoring that person from now on – hardly in keeping with his policy of being…

…generally polite and in the interests of acquiring knowledge or validating opinion or giving out knowledge…

It’s the “acquisition of knowledge and validating of opinion” – by steamrollering everyone else – that causes the arguments that stop people posting on most forums The cause of people not posting is not the argument itself, but the belittling that leads up to that argument by people who are legends in their (and their supporters’) own lunchtimes.

I keep well away from these things, but they make great reading sometimes.

ADIs Getting Desperate For Work?

22/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI

I’ve noticed a few comments on various forums, lately, from people complaining that other ADIs are trying to poach their pupils by undercutting and making “offers” (perhaps another way of saying “making bribes”) to get them to switch.

I can’t say I’ve noticed it myself, but I don’t doubt that it is happening. Mind you – and now that I think about it – I have had enquiries, and I just know the pupil has gone with a cheaper school after phoning around. So maybe that’s part of the same story. But to continue…

You see, there has been a huge influx of ADIs into this job over recent years. I’m not one of those people who automatically assumes that this is a bad thing because it is taking away work which might otherwise have come to me. But I amcertain that the quality of many of those ADIs is questionable – not necessarily just their teaching skills (after all, they may have what it takes in that department), but more probably their motivation and business acumen.

As I’ve said many times, and most recently in that post about leisure time, you have to know what you are getting into. If you want to be successful at it, this is not a 9-5/Mon-Fri affair, and you have to be on the boil all the time to avoid running into trees or ditches on straight roads. And that’s where the problems for many begin…

Lazy people want the oft-mentioned £30,000 salary, and many of them definitely fall into the “no qualifications needed” category. In addition, maybe they have kids and can’t do school runs or weekends. Plus, can’t handle the stress. So, if they pass the exams and start trading as ADIs while carrying this sort of baggage, £30,000 is not going to be knocking on Mr Bank Account’s door anytime soon! But it still costs money to be in business, even if you aren’t actually doing any.

Step 1 is to try undercutting. The big schools are charging perhaps £24 an hour, so they go in at £21. It doesn’t work, so next comes £20, £19, and so on. Step 2 is the “special offers” – first 10 lessons for £99, or whatever.

I question ADIs’ business acumen simply because this ploy has never worked, and it never will – and especially now that so many are doing it. Even if it filled up your diary, the amount of work you need once you’ve undercut everyone else is now something like 15 hours more than it would have been if you’d have succeeded at your original price, in order for you to make the same turnover. But the reality is it just doesn’t fill up your diary – it just sends you further down the deadly spiral towards giving it all up.

So, we come to Step 3. Since we already know that the people coming into the job are not necessarily of the highest standard when it comes to business ethics, it stands to reason that some might try to poach work.

I don’t know if everyone is familiar with a 1980s TV show, called Boys From The Blackstuff. There was a character (Yosser Hughes) in that whose line was “Gizza job – I can do that”, and this has since passed into the English language as an accepted and recognised phrase. What we have is a real case of that: people so desperate for work that they will resort to anything.

Undercutting and ridiculous offers are bad enough. I’m quite sure that the majority of ADIs aren’t trying to poach pupils, although I’m also pretty sure that some are – through sheer desperation and lack of morals.

Leisure Time As An ADI?

20/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI, General

A reader has asked how I get any leisure time when my diary is open between 8am and 10pm 7 days a week. Perhaps this explanation will also help others who are wondering about becoming ADIs.

It hinges on the fact that work is never guaranteed or 100% reliable – and this is especially true when you first start.

When I qualified some years ago it was my intention to cast my net as widely as possible to get as much work as possible as quickly as possible. So for the first year I was covering almost all of Nottinghamshire and the south-east side of Derbyshire (including Derby itself). It worked, but I dropped Derbyshire and some of the north Nottinghamshire postcodes because it was getting increasingly difficult to get from one pupil to the next, especially when they were at opposite ends of my geographical range. But this is a partial digression.

The fact is that you can have 50 hours or more in your diary one week (and it does happen) and only about 20 hours the next. It’s just the way it is. The full weeks are just those where everyone wants a lesson at the same time and no one cancels, the quieter ones are where people just don’t book or you get cancellations (colds and flu, exams, holidays, Christmas, and so on). It averages out somewhere in between.

So, looking at the situation on the one hand, you have a wide open diary and people can book anywhere between 8am and 10pm Monday to Friday. More often than not (and with judicious diary management), you can get them to book 10-12 in the morning, 2-4pm, and 6-8pm or times thereabouts. Seven days of 6 hours gives you a 42 hour week, but you are more likely to get a few empty slots and so you’ll end up doing between 30-40 hours. This is on average, mind you. On a good (depending on how you look at it) week, you’ll get people wanting lessons who have to fit in around whoever is already booked, so you might get some early lesson in and book the others at 11-1. Or someone might have booked 7-9pm, which then frees up another 2 hour slot in the afternoon which then gets snapped up. It’s those kinds of weeks which give you the 50+.

On the other hand, though, the weeks where people cancel or just don’t book for some reason give you free time which is paid for by the other weeks.

I also blank out whole days when I feel like it (and before they are booked) and pupils have no trouble shifting around those. For example, I have a day off next week because I just felt like one. And I had one last week, and the week before. It’s just not a problem.

Although my diary is open 8am until 10pm, I have worked as late as 11pm and midnight before (so I could do a Pass Plus session in the dark around midsummer). I also sometimes start as early as 6.30am if a pupil has an early test booked and lives a little way out (done several of those during the winter). I also have a current pupil who originally preferred 7.30am lessons before college, but now does 9am instead.

Now, I am not a morning person – but I will do this simply because if I say ‘no’ then I might lose the work. To be honest, nowadays I could afford to say ‘no’, but the effect on my reputation might be a longer-lasting problem (good or bad), so I just do it. I enjoy it, anyway.

This job is not a 9-5 Monday to Friday affair. If you become an ADI and do it like that then you can expect to earn a little pocket money at best, but not a living – I think this is one reason why so many instructors are suffering. They just don’t give the customers what they want, so the customer finds someone who does.

So that’s basically it. Once you are established you can nudge pupils to fit in around your own availability – but you will always have to be flexible because sometimes they can’t be. If you stick rigidly to set hours you will always end up losing some work that you’d otherwise get (two of mine have recently said “my last instructor couldn’t do weekends” – so he (x2) lost them, and I got them!) I also see instructors boasting about how they tell the pupils when they can have lessons and have fixed slots in their diaries – all well and good until a pupil comes to you who finishes work at 3.45pm and so doesn’t fit into your 2-4 or 3-5 slot; but like I say, I get plenty like that. Some weeks you’ll be snowed under, others you’ll have free time.

The free time isn’t regular or predictable – not in large chunks, anyway – but it is there. You can book weeks off for annual holidays if you plan lessons and tests well ahead, but you must never let a pupil down (and you must realise you get no income at all for those weeks)

The big question is whether you want a job like this. And only you can decide if you do!

Older Drivers

16/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI, News

Further to my recent post about the RAC’s call for larger lettering for older drivers, there is another story on a similar topic on the BBC website (I think it is just a different take on the same report).

This time, the claim is that older drivers are safer than young ones. The BBC article opens:

Elderly motorists should not be forced to retake the driving test as they are often safer than young drivers, a report by the RAC Foundation has found.

This has to rate as one of the most superficial and misleading statements of all time.

The RAC Foundation’s Stephen Glaister said:

Despite the myths, older drivers are no less safe than other age groups.

But then the article continues:

The foundation added that re-testing could break equality legislation.

This is the crux of it: political correctness and equality. Again.

I’m going to see if I can find it, but that report is actually quite a lot older than you’d think. I saw it sometime last year – or rather, the research paper with the raw data – and it is absolutely clear than reaction times get longer as people get older. So clear, indeed, that it is a simple fact.

Not every old person is going to be as bad as the worst one on the road, or as good as the best one in the age group. But the average (and the fact that the average is a fact) surely demands that lives are more important than ridiculous ideas of equality.

If someone can’t drive safely then they are not equal. If they can drive safely (enough) then they are. It’s as simple as that.

Equality is about allowing people to drive if they meet the base criteria. Not – as some seem to believe – that you should be allowed to drive no matter what.

If you look at this link, for example (it’s American), the abstract says:

Older drivers have higher rates of crashes per mile driven compared with most other drivers, and these crashes result in greater morbidity and mortality. Various aspects of cognition, particularly visual attention, have been linked with crash risk among older individuals. The current study was designed to specify those cognitive variables associated with specific on-road driving behaviors in a sample of older, nonclinic-referred individuals.

Not quite what the RAC is saying, is it? Quite the opposite, in fact – and it’s only from 2002.

The British Medical Journal has another article (also 2002), and in its abstract it says:

Driver crash involvement rates per capita decreased with age, but fatal involvement rates per capita increased starting at age 70. The same pattern existed for involvement rates per licensed driver. For both all crashes and fatal crashes, involvement rates per mile driven increased appreciably at age 70.

What this is saying is that as people get older they get better and have fewer accidents, but at a certain point (age 70 is identified) fatal accidents increase. Looking at all accidents, at age 70 they also increased appreciably. So older drivers do have more fatal and non-fatal accidents.

Speaking Of Accidents…

14/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI, Driving Tests

Earlier this week I had a pupil on test. He’s a good driver.

So, he drives off and – 40 minutes later – arrives back at the test centre. I’ve seen him coming up the driveway, so I collect my magazine, throw my cup in the bin, and head outside.

As usual, I walk slowly towards the parked car so the examiner can either wave me over or not. The door opens (not a good sign) and I’m waved over. The examiner has got his head in his hands:

I can’t believe you did that.
Examiner

I asked what had happened, and the examiner told me. It turns out my pupil had got two faults up to that point. But when they came into the car park the examiner asked him to pull into a bay – head first, not as the reverse park manoeuvre – and he didn’t stop in time and bumped into the crash barrier at the back!

The examiner was almost lost for words, and just said several times: “I can’t believe it”. He added at the end, shaking his head and looking for the right things to say:

You can obviously drive [a nice line: I taught him from scratch], so just book your test again. If anything, you were a little harsh with some of your braking sometimes [he wasn’t marked down for any of that] – but when it mattered you didn’t do it hard enough! I just don’t know what to say. It has to be a fail because it could have been another car or a pedestrian.
Examiner

Depending on how you look at it, it was a good debrief (all the Nottingham examiners are decent people and say it like it is).

I could have killed him (my pupil, that is).

As I was driving him home – and bear in mind he is a Chelsea supporter, so he wasn’t going to get away without a major ribbing over it – he eventually asked:

So, if I hadn’t have done that I’d have passed?

I replied:

Yes. Yes. YES. That’s the whole point. If you hadn’t have hit the barrier, you’d be sitting there with a Pass Certificate. You only got two faults, which is very good.

He started slapping himself, which saved me the trouble.

There’s no damage to the car. But this guy is one of those people you just know you’re going to stay in contact with after he passes (even if it’s just texting insults to each other about the football results).

BSM Pupil Flips Car

13/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI

I noticed this story on the BBC website today, about a learner who had an accident on a lesson and flipped the car. My first thought was for the occupants.

True to form, though, this does not appear to be the first thought which has occurred to many other instructors out there. Some know-it-alls wonder “what the instructor was doing at the time “. Others suggest that “CPD is urgently required “.

I would just like to point out to these “experts” that when someone rear ends you (and many of these “experts” have been rear-ended, or worse) because you or your pupil stops suddenly, although it is their fault for insurance purposes, it is really you or your learner’s fault, in large part, for stopping so abruptly in the first place.

So whatever it was which led to the BSM car having an accident like this is just another example of one of the many things which can go wrong when you are an instructor. It’s not a reason to start saying bad things about BSM or the other ADI (not unless you have a bit of an inflated opinion of yourself, anyway).

I should also point out that a pupil told me today she’d been involved in an incident several years ago, which resulted in rolling the car, and that she had ended up with severe concussion. It can happen to anyone.

BSM’s statement has led to more criticism:

We have spoken to the learner driver who is fine and is already hoping to book her next lesson with us soon.

The instructor responded calmly, professionally and swiftly, and is back on the road in a new car.

The Wise Ones believe that BSM is just plugging itself at the pupil’s expense, when in fact they are trying to point out that the pupil was fine and not put off by the incident. What else are they going to say, for crying out loud?

Speaking personally, over the years I’ve had a couple of gentle rear-end shunts (no damage), one burst tyre (driving straight at a very high kerb when parking outside her house), and – my worst one – reversing into a high wall on the turn in the road exercise by hitting the gas instead of the brake and lifting the clutch up (I stopped him in time for there to be no damage to the car, but only just).

But I could have had a whole lot more: pupils trying to turn right on to roundabouts, suddenly deciding to go left when indicating right (and vice versa), suddenly deciding to go left or right when in the straight-ahead lane, suddenly deciding to emergency stop for the dead squirrel (or, in one case, “horse poo”) in the road, not preparing to stop for the squadron of old ladies on the crossing just in front of us, a dyspraxic pupil suddenly steering left on a dead straight road (“I have no idea why I did that”), another dyspraxic almost climbing into the footwell to look at the gear stick when turning left on a bend, with a 20 foot ditch next to us, in heavy rain, in pitch dark, and with another car waiting to emerge, and so on. The list is almost infinite.

No one’s perfect, and if a pupil does something totally unexpected, any instructor is likely to be caught out eventually. This unfortunate ADI was – and it has nothing to do with him being with BSM, nor does it put into question his abilities as an ADI.

Incidentally, the same story in The Sun gives a better insight into how it happened:

The driver, aged in her 20s, lost control after she locked the steering wheel to the right and stamped on the accelerator pedal as she left a junction.

Instead of sedately joining the road the brand new black Fiat 500 performed a high-speed u-turn straight into a garden gate.

The householder whose gate it was adds more information:

She had the steering wheel on full lock and accelerated.

The car effectively performed a u-turn and drove up my garden gate before quite gracefully landing upside down on my drive.

But the comments to the bottom of that story by the usual troglodytes are no better than the ones I’ve already referred to.

EDIT 26/05/2010: I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but there appears to be a lot of very unpleasant people around if the search terms used to find this post are anything to go by. Anyone who hates BSM as much as some appear to do, without having actually ever been franchised to them, ought to seek medical advice urgently before they succumb to their own venom!

Roadworks In Ruddington

13/04/2010

DOAADI

ADI, Roadworks

I’m getting a lot of hits on this search term at the moment. Not a big surprise, really, given the total hash the Councils are making of all roadworks in Nottingham since the start of the year.

In Ruddington, along the A60, they decided that all the bus stops needed the kerb raising by a few centimetres. No doubt, this is so that the thousands upon thousands of wheelchairs and pushchairs who use the buses in Ruddington each day can get on and off more easily. Naturally, it was a case of “sod the motorist” over the months it took them to modify the dozen or so stops, with idiotic road closures and whole weeks with little or no attempt to complete the work – and which, naturally, overran by weeks.

I would point out that the average bus driver is incapable of stopping within 2 metres of a specific target even under test conditions, and when you have people pratting about with shopping and pushchairs on board it is even less likely. Around here, they also frequently stop wherever they bloody well want (picking up their mates outside one of the City depots at traffic lights, or dropping people off “nearer to home” – even if it IS blocking the road when they do it).

Also in Ruddington, they are due to commence – or I should say “re-commence” – work near to the Wilford Road/Clifton Road junction. So far, they have widened a footpath (just in case any passing 747s might need it to do an emergency landing), erected a load of posts with those segregated pedestrian and cycle route signs for the local residents to park in between (half on the pavement and half off), and for cyclists to ignore totally in their ongoing quest to cause hold ups to traffic during rush hour, and partially dug up the existing pedestrian islands at the end of Clifton Road. A big yellow sign warns of impending chaos starting on Monday, I think.

And then – at the moment – there is yet another gas leak at the end of Kirk Lane, where it crosses the A60 on to Flawforth Lane. This must be the fourth or fifth leak in as many years in that exact same spot. It is slap in the middle of the crossroads – ironically, resulting in the same four-way traffic control the councils had in for a week when they recently repainted about 10 metres of lines along the A60. The gas people appear to be ex-Council workers, because once they’d erected the lights yesterday, then stood around in groups of three (tch! Health & Safety, eh?) holding those electronic gas sniffers (they’d identified the gas leak last week and put cones up, and been down a manhole), they packed up and went home well before 2.30pm and left the chaos (and traffic lights) behind.

EDIT 13/04/2010: I drove down the A60 early this afternoon and it is bloody gridlocked on all four roads. So much so that rather than come back that way, I took a detour through Gotham. Surely there must be some legislation that says these people have to fix faults quickly? Because there should be.

EDIT 15/04/2010: They’ve still got the 4-way lights in as of 2pm this afternoon, and a small digger – so it looks like it won’t be fixed this week. This has been going on for the whole week already (the leak was first ‘visited’ this time last week).

I went to pick a pupil up from Tollerton this evening and the knock-on effect is that the junction of Main Road in Plumtree with the A606 is also virtually gridlocked – it’s not easy to get out of there at the best of times, especially to turn right towards Cotgrave, and people were taking big risks. Basically, the only way to avoid the roadworks is to take a very long detour or just get stuck in heavier traffic (actually, both those things). And at 8pm tonight they were not doing any work, but the lights are still up.

It’s appalling that National Grid are allowed to get away with this.

EDIT 18/04/2010: Went that way tonight and they are finished. At last.

EDIT 29/04/2010: I’m still getting a lot of hits for this. There are still roadworks in Ruddington around Wilford Road, but these are to do with resurfacing the road and farting about with the pavements (putting in “pedestrian peninsulas” – I just made that term up – and widening them so that cyclists of the prattus spandexius variety will have more space to ignore as they cause hold-ups during rush hour). To be fair, the delays due to the works are minimal, so I wouldn’t worry about them. They aren’t far away from finishing, by the looks of things.

EDIT 04/05/2010: Still getting a lot of hits for this, which makes me think I must be missing something! The resurfacing work around the Wilford Road/Clifton Road is almost finished and isn’t causing too many delays (far fewer than those elderly drivers – or the mentally impaired owner of that mini-supermarket – who insist on parking on yellow lines right on the corner of Easthorpe Street/Church Street and causing a total blockage). There are also roadworks on the A60 in Bunny during the day, with delays dependent on the volume of traffic (these are down to Le Cirque Du Nottingham County Council putting in a driveway to a field they appear to have given planning permission for building on. As usual for them, a task which ought to take a couple of days has “at least three weeks” written all over it). Thankfully, since it is the council handling it, work starts late mornings and ceases very early in the afternoon, so disruption is minimal.

EDIT 05/05/2010: They’re also doing some resurfacing work on the A60 between the Nottingham Knight island and Kirk Lane – but only in the evenings. This is scheduled to last two weeks. Was there tonight and you need to be careful coming off the roundabout because the way it is being managed is resulting in congestion back on to it.

EDIT 17/05/2010: Still getting hits for this. The resurfacing between the Nottingham Knight and Kirk Lane appears to be over and done with. Not a bad job, either, with congestion restricted to evenings and weekends.

They still appear to have some lines to paint (and some footpaths to put chicanes into) on Wilford Road towards the Golf Club, but this isn’t causing any congestion at all during the day – and I go through there quite a lot.

The gateway they were installing in Bunny appears almost complete, and no sign of the totally unnecessary (it was Le Cirque du County Council, after all) temporary lights and lane closures for the last week. God help us when they start doing whatever it is they’re going to do on that field, though.

EDIT 19/05/2010: Spoke too soon! The bloody road is up outside the petrol station, and temporary lights are installed. Absolute chaos coming towards Nottingham from Bunny at 4.30pm this afternoon. And they were doing something at the Kirk Lane lights (again) yesterday (down to one lane). Looked like something to do with the light sensors, but no doubt it will disturb the gas line under there, and we’ll have another leak before long.