Category - ADI

Although I’ve tended to move away from this topic over the years, in the past – fired by the comments of imbeciles on web forums which no longer exist – I’ve often made the point that many ADIs are complete prats in almost everything they do.

Back in the days when the three-point-turn (aka turn in the road) and corner reverse were part of the driving test, the behaviour of other ADIs was appalling when you wanted to practice.

For example. Near me, there is an industrial estate, which is very quiet on evenings and at weekends. With experienced pupils, I would have used any relatively quiet corner or road anywhere in the city to do the reverse corner exercise, but with new pupils it was better to have a road with little traffic to worry about. Industrial estates were good places for that reason.

If we arrived and someone else was using the corner, I’d tell my pupil to drive on, and we would either use another corner, or do something else instead. That’s because ever since I became an instructor, I have always made it a point not to interfere with other instructors or their pupils. Unfortunately, for reasons I have never fathomed, other ADIs seem to go out of their way to inconvenience everyone. I’m not sure if it is because they are simply stupid and unaware, or if they are doing it on purpose because they are stupid in a different way.

In the past, I have had them queuing up behind me waiting to use a corner (for the reverse exercise), and on more than one occasion one of them moved in when we were part way round. In those cases, they moved off when I got out and told them we were using the corner.

It was the same with the turn in the road exercise. Again, there is an industrial estate which is quiet on weekends. These days, it has parked vans on it, which are ideal for parallel park practice, but some years ago it would be deserted – especially on Sundays. One of the roads was about half a mile long, which was useful for the turn in the road manoeuvre. And yet I can recall at least half a dozen instances where we had driven in and stopped, only to have another driving school car turn up and stop right behind us to do the same manoeuvre, preventing us from moving while they did it. And it didn’t matter if we’d stopped at the beginning, middle, or end of the road – wherever we stopped, they would come close behind. On another occasion, I’d pulled my pupil over on a narrow road in Bramcote to discuss something, only for another instructor to come from the opposite direction and stop directly opposite, creating a bottleneck for other traffic. Yet the road was otherwise empty of parked vehicles.

This is why I refuse to have anything to do with other instructors. Most of them are complete pillocks.

Another time, I was in a small car park on an industrial estate one weekend. It has nine parking spaces one side, and five the other. As I intimated earlier, if someone is using it (or if any of the bays are occupied by employees or boy racers eating their McDonalds), I give it a wide berth and go somewhere else. It is only big enough for one learner to practice at a time – if anyone else goes in, only one of you can move, and if employees are already parked there you’re likely to get complaints. But one time, another instructor did come in while I was practising with a learner, blocking us completely. He left after I had a quiet word.

There’s a similar problem at the Colwick Test Centre. They have repeatedly asked instructors not to use the centre car park unless they have a test, but as I said, most instructors are pillocks. The lesser pillocks will queue outside the centre, and then drive in en masse once all the tests have gone out to practice bay parking. But several – and it is a large several – go in at test times and get in the way.

Last year, one of my pupils was heading out of the compound on his test. One of these pillocks was waiting to come in, and his pupil had stopped wide at the give way line, which resulted in my pupil kerbing the car. I saw it happen as I was walking down to the exit myself. When they got back, the examiner was spitting feathers and swearing. She said to my pupil:

I’ve told that idiot more than once not to come in when tests are going out, but he keeps doing it. You went on to the kerb and I’m supposed to fail you for that – you’ve passed, by the way – but he was blocking the road. I want his registration number so I can do something about it…

Driving examiner

At that point, I told her my dashcam would have caught it and I’d be more than happy to provide it. She gave me her office phone number, and I happily did provide her with the information an hour later.

A fortnight ago, I went in for a test ten minutes before our time (as the test centre requests). We stopped at the top of the drive to allow two other school cars to reverse into bays. I said to my pupil at the time that this was going to be like watching paint dry, and it was. But it turned out that one of them wasn’t there for a test – it was practising in the car park. Some stupid cow in a Mercedes. My pupil didn’t even have time to go to the loo by the time we finally got in (but the examiner was happy to wait a moment while she did – she passed).

That’s the beauty of technology. Years ago, it was just a visual thing, and I used to write down the registration numbers of anyone behaving like a prat and put an article on the blog. Nowadays, you can capture it in glorious 4K video, and record sound and video using bodycams. Better still, Nottinghamshire Police now accept online dashcam footage, and I’m currently running at 26 submissions out of 30 where they have told me they will be taking further action. Technology also came in handy recently.

A few weeks ago, I went into the Toton Park and Ride with a pupil to do bay parking with her for the first time. The entire far side of the P+R was empty, except for three parked vehicles dotted around, and one learner doing the bay park (right in the main driveway (sigh)). I mean, we’re talking about 250+ empty parking bays, across nine separate blocks. We detoured so as to leave that learner alone, and went into one of the corner blocks. All caught on dashcam, you understand (that’s a screen capture at the top from my dashcam on the day in question).

Anyway, I’m conducting the lesson in my usual way. I firstly do the manoeuvre using my dual controls and ask them how I managed to get into the bay. Then I do it again, showing them the mechanics of what we just discussed. Then I ask them to try it with me talking them through it. It was just as my pupil began to try it herself for the first time that she became distracted. Another school car had turned up right behind us and was waiting. I told her to ignore him and carry on, but she isn’t ready for that yet, so I had to get involved to get her out of the way.

Once we’d reversed in, I expected the other learner to drive past – some idiot instructors (and most uninsured parents) use the P+R as an enclosed driving circuit – but he stopped directly in front of us. Then he moved forward slightly to position. Incredibly, the imbecile was planning to reverse bay park next to us! The whole damned car park was empty, but he blocked us in to do the manoeuvre right next to us!

I got out and waved at him. He rolled down his window. I said:

The whole car park is empty [the dashcam shows I gestured to the empty expanse], but you’ve now blocked us in. She’s doing the bay park for the first time, and now we can’t move. You could have gone anywhere, but you came here, right next to us. Why?

He looked at me, and I continued:

Look, I’m not being rude or anything, but… come on!

The video shows him wave in acknowledgement, and me give the thumbs up. All caught by my dashcam in crystal clear 4K broadcast quality video – his registration number, vehicle type, and school name. But no audio, of course.

That should have been the end of it, with him having learned an important lesson in etiquette and common sense, but a couple of days later I got a call telling me someone had complained and that I had used offensive language. But I had an ace up my sleeve. You see, as well as a very high resolution dashcam, I also have a bodycam. It’s about the size of a thick USB stick, so it is very discreet when clipped to my shirt. I don’t have it recording video (there’s no need) – but I do have it recording audio on loop.

And that turned out to be very useful in this case when dealing with someone who was a liar as well as a prat.

I’ve mentioned many times in the past that driving instructors are nothing special, even if they think they are. Many of them are just as stupid as the general public. This one certainly was – unless he was just so clueless that this somehow made sense to him.

My advice to anyone thinking of becoming an instructor – and to anyone who already is one – is to use some bloody common sense and keep away from other learners. If someone is using ‘your’ special place, tough. Go somewhere else, like I do. You can easily find somewhere else to practice unless you are totally clueless. And if you are one of those who is afflicted by the need to always cluster around others, get treatment for it.

If you’re going to take them on to main roads, make them drive at least close to the speed limit – it’s better for them and for everyone else. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be there. On the first lesson with a new pupil, when going through what each pedal does, I say to mine when discussing the accelerator:

I’ll usually call it the gas pedal, because it’s quicker to say. ‘More gas’ means press it harder, ‘less gas’ means press it less. ‘Off the gas’ means take your foot away from it. And my favourite is ‘gas, gas, gas, gas, gas’ when I want you to go faster – I’ll use that a lot to start with once we get on the big roads, because going slow annoys other drivers, and that means you’ll be under pressure if they overtake or start tooting at you.

And stay out of the damned test centre unless you’re going to a test. You have to be a complete idiot to want to practice there and risk messing up other people’s tests.

We own our house outright, so the increase in interest rates from 3.5% to 4% – the highest level for 14 years – doesn’t affect us too much.

In fact, I actually got a laugh out of it when I read the BBC’s guide to interest rates (it was written last year, but they’ve linked to it again after today’s announcement). They explain:

Interest is the extra cash you get charged for a loan

If a friend loans you £10 at a 10% interest rate, you’ll pay them back £11. That’s the £10 you borrowed plus an extra £1 (10% of £10) as interest. Banks have more complicated ways of calculating this, but that’s the general idea.

BBC

While this is not actually wrong, the ‘more complicated ways’ the banks use make it very close to being so. It is far, far more complex than that, and how they have worded it implies the banks are inventing some mysterious calculation intended to rip people off. They are not.

I’m even more amused by why they thought it necessary to explain even the simple example they gave.

It’s been a stressful week. My mum was rushed into hospital last Thursday with severe back pain, and it turns out she has fractures in her spine. They say it will heal, but she’s still in pain and on powerful painkillers as a result of the manipulations necessary when she has a scan or physiotherapy.

I’ve been visiting her daily, and I use the Queen’ Medical Centre (QMC) car parks. At night that isn’t much of a problem, but during the day I want to get out and punch people for being so stupid in those car parks.

I usually go in off the A52 (other routes are congested during the day and early evening, especially with the A52 Derby Road being closed for the next three months, because of sodding Cadent again), then circle the whole campus to get into the main car park, where there are more likely to be spaces. The problems start at Car Park No. 1 (near the East Block). It isn’t a very big one and is invariably full, but people still queue to get in, preventing others moving further through the campus. They will actually block the road indefinitely in the hope the ‘FULL’ sign goes out. Then there is the Treatment Centre multi-storey car park. You can only use that if you have an appointment at the Treatment Centre iself, but you have to go past it to access Car Park No. 3 (the main one), and people queue for that, too. I was stuck there for ten minutes yesterday, and finally overtook the queue to get by.

But today, I couldn’t believe what I saw in Car Park No. 3. There were actually quite a few parking spaces when I went at just after 1pm. But as most readers will probably know, parking even a few metres further away from where you’d like to park is totally unacceptable if you are a fucking idiot, like the one in the photos here, and this means you’ll park wherever you want – however you want.

As I drove through, I’d identified at least six parking spaces I could use if necessary. But I followed the route they have now introduced and looped around – only to be blocked by the utter prat who had parked like this.

They hadn’t parked in a bay. And they hadn’t parked straight. In fact, it looked for all the world as if they had purposely left their car in the diagonal position across the road route in order to block people in. I had to carefully reverse back around sharp corners (watching for other traffic) as a result. I’d have had to mount the footpath to get past otherwise.

I doubt that they will do anything, but I am reporting it. The annoying thing is, if I parked crooked or outside of a bay even half as badly, I’d probably end up being ‘spoken with’. Yet these sleazebags get away with it and mess things up for everyone else.

Update: I went in again on 2 February and this was in the same location as the idiot above, blocking the thoroughfare.

I originally wrote this after I saw this question posed on a forum a while back. The premise was that if you have been trained properly, you could pass your test at any test centre in the country. The same argument comes up periodically, and I have updated the article.

Some ADIs leap on the claim like starved chihuahuas on a pork chop. I mean, they’re better than everyone else and all their pupils could pass anywhere in the world. It’s a nice theory, and – theoretically – it ought to be true. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and reality has a big say in matters.

For most learners, passing their test at the test centre they know like the back of their hand is far from guaranteed. The national pass rate is about 45%, and even the best and most well-prepared drivers can get caught out on the day on roads they know well for any one of a hundred different reasons.

Then, there are some areas even ADIs would find challenging if they’d never driven there before. It’s worse still for new drivers, even if they have been there. Nottingham doesn’t have any particularly awe-inspiring geographical features, but it does have a few roads on steep hills and big roundabouts. The Nuthall roundabout – following the A6002 from Stapleford towards Hucknall, for example – would be a major problem for an experienced but unfamiliar driver, since to go straight ahead you need the right-hand lane, and the road markings only become visible after the single-lane road splits into four lanes. This one is on the test routes at Watnall, and unless someone has been shown how to do it, they would probably do it wrong (and they sometimes still do it wrong even if they’ve been shown how a dozen times).

Then there is the geographic area itself. In the most extreme case, Mallaig in Scotland is often cited as having the highest pass rate in the country. This isn’t because the drivers who take tests there are better than anywhere else, but almost wholly down to the fact that Mallaig is a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere. It has something like 10km of roads in total, no dual carriageways, one small roundabout, and a total population of under 200 in a village of 67 dwellings (and about 1,000 inhabitants in the total catchment area). It is 140 miles away from the nearest motorway, and only a few miles north west of the place where Connor MacLeod was born in Highlander. And it does around 20 tests a year – that’s one thousand times fewer tests than are conducted in Nottingham.

Nevertheless, some learners are prepared to travel up there from all over the UK in the belief they will automatically pass. And they often don’t. Quite recently, there was a case where a woman travelled up from London to do it and failed. The underlying rule is that if you can’t drive, you won’t pass anywhere, no matter how ‘easy’ it is supposed to be. In this case, she was ‘afraid of roundabouts’, and assumed that there was no underlying cause of that, when there clearly was.

There are no certainties in driving, and definitely not in driving tests. If there were, there would be pass rates of 100% by the bucket load, and instructors would be boasting more zero-fault passes than you could shake a stick at. The best you can say is that the odds of passing change if you alter what you do. Taking a test in an unfamiliar place is an alteration which is likely to add more things for the typical learner to be concerned with than it does to remove those they’re already concerned with.

No one who claims their pupils would pass no matter where they took their test has ever evaluated the claim. It’s impossible to do so, since you can’t test the same pupil in different places, everyone is different, and every test is different.

Sometimes my own pupils get it into their heads, when trying to book a test sooner than is available at the nearest centre, that going for one elsewhere would be a good idea. I only deal with Nottingham, so if they come up with Sutton in Ashfield, Loughborough, or Leicester (and they do), I refuse outright. If I don’t know how to get there without looking it up, they can forget it. I’m more amenable to the idea if it’s another Nottingham one, but not if they only do one hour lessons and a simple round trip is more than 30 minutes or so in good traffic. I will also usually put a block on it if they want the test within a couple of weeks and haven’t driven the area before.

If they persist, a quick drive around the relevant area is usually enough to get them to change their minds. Once they’ve seen all the lorries and roads full of potholes around Colwick, the Nuthall and IKEA roundabouts for Watnall, or the Long Eaton roundabout for Chilwell, most decide to stay where they were before.

As a footnote to this updated article, I ought to mention a pupil I had late 2022. His parents had taught him to drive, and I’d been recommended to them by a previous pupil to ‘finish him off’. He was a good driver – his parents had done a superb job. I brushed him up on a few bad habits, and taught him the manoeuvres (which he hadn’t done at all), but he learned very quickly. His test was booked several months hence at Colwick, but he used a cancellation checker and got one for the following week. The problem was that I couldn’t do it (I already had a test that day, which overlapped), and it was at Ashfield in north Nottinghamshire (an area I don’t cover anyway). He decided to go in his own car with his mum, but he’d never driven there before. I advised him to get his mum to take him there, find the test centre, and drive around that general area up to 20 minutes away in all directions, and then back again a different way. I used his remaining two lessons to teach him the manoeuvres in his own car.

He passed with a clean sheet – zero faults.

I’ve ended up with lots of referrals from him and his parents (six, so far), who are crediting me with his success. But I make it absolutely clear that his parents deserve the credit, and not me. I just helped a bit.

However, he was a special case. Most learners have enough trouble driving on roads they’ve done many times before, without the extra confusion from doing ones they’ve never seen.

Which test centre do you recommend?

The nearest one. If a pupil can only do one hour lessons, and lives in Long Eaton, with the Chilwell TC five minutes away, and we’ve done most of our lessons around Long Eaton, Chilwell, Beeston, and Bramcote, they’re not booking a test at Colwick, which is a good 30-40 minutes away, solely on the grounds that their mate (who lives there) passed at it last week. Not without a big discussion, anyway. I once did a test at Colwick with someone who lived in Long Eaton (we’d done many of the two hour lessons over there, mainly at night), and on test day it took us over an hour and a half just to get there – we arrived a few minutes late. Fortunately, she passed.

If they really want to use a different test centre, they can do longer lessons to make sure we can familiarise with it.

So, you just teach people test routes?

I’ve written many times about the distance I cover with pupils on lessons. Someone who I have been teaching from the start will have been on the A46 with me, and many will have been down to Leicester and back on the M1 if they do two hour lessons. They’ll have been on single-track roads, driven through a ford, dealt with horses and nut jobs with a Spandex fetish on country lanes, and quite possibly have seen Southwell Minster. All of them now know where (and what) Newstead Abbey is, and will marvel at how much of Sherwood Forest has fewer trees than a football pitch does. All of them will have passed through at least some of the villages of Papplewick, Wysall, Rempstone, Widmerpool, Wymeswold, Tollerton, and many others, for the first (and possibly last) time in their lives. On a recent one, we covered over 40 miles in an hour and half lesson.

But no matter where they have driven with me, the test will be conducted within a very tightly defined area, and driving through the ford near Oxton – while useful in its own right – isn’t going to help them stay in lane when they have to deal with the Virgin roundabout in Colwick. Nor is it going to help get it into their heads that when the bus lane ends heading back to the test centre, if they don’t move into the left lane, they’re likely to panic and mess up big time when they realise the lane they’re in is now right-turn only, and the examiner said to go straight ahead at the lights. The ford won’t help them finally grasp that driving on Marshall Hill Drive cannot be done in third gear unless you’re doing 30mph all the way up it, and that those Give Way signs at the top mean that when get there you should take your foot off the gas and be careful of vehicles coming the other way. It won’t help them understand that when people are walking across the road in front of them in West Bridgford town centre, it’s most likely because they’re on one of the seven zebra crossings over about 300 metres, and that it might be a good idea to slow down and stop for them. Oh, and the ford won’t teach them that no matter how many times they try, they can’t go straight ahead at that first mini-roundabout in West Bridgford, because the pretty red signs with a white bar across them say so.

It all comes down to this: if you can’t drive properly, you won’t pass – no matter where you take your test.

I’m teaching them how to be novice drivers. They can gain 30 years of experience… over the next 30 years by themselves. They’re not going to get that in the three months they’re with me.

People doing intensive courses have to use different test centres

I have my own views on intensive courses, but if you do them and have to book wherever is available, then that’s your affair. I’m not convinced that the test centre used should be dictated by the timescale involved in the first place, but even more so when it is just to avoid taking lessons (which it usually is with mine when they do it). Lack of familiarity with an area is unlikely to go in their favour.

Most test routes are intended to be at least a little challenging, taking in steep hills, one-way streets, heavily pedestrianised areas, and so on. I would lose pupils if I hadn’t shown them these features and they encountered them for the first time on their test. I’d lose even more if a particular individual had issues with certain things, and I hadn’t spent time on specific and more troublesome examples of them on test routes across several lessons to put things right.

Some pupils might not be fazed by unfamiliar territory. But many more are.

The end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 has been a bummer for legendary artists dying. Now we’ve lost another, in David Crosby, who has died at the age of 81.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young) are one of the defining groups of the 60s and 70s (though they were active up until 2015). I remember several of their songs from when I was a kid playing on the radio, so they certainly defined part of my childhood.

RIP, David.

I’ve been doing my own self assessment (SA) tax return for eighteen years now. The only time I ever need to contact HMRC is if something is wrong, and I can count the number of those instances on the fingers of one hand.

Having said that, HMRC (His Majesty’s Customs and Revenue) is a bit of a pain to deal with if you do need to speak with them. At the time you usually need to do it, everyone else is too, and there’s often a queue, and they can’t discuss certain things – the very things I am likely to want to address – over the phone.

But at least they have humans at the other end, and a fairly straightforward menu system. So, guess what they are trialling now? Yup. Support via text messages.

Oddly, this general topic came up the other day for different reasons. I was having a discussion (aka ‘argument’) on a message board concerning online help. My personal preference when I Google for a solution to some problem is for a detailed text script of instructions. I hate video or audio podcast-type instructions, and avoid them whenever possible.

The reason (for me) is that with text, you get ‘do this, then this, then this’ – and even if it is padded out with a load of crap you can scroll past that and find the bit you need. And words tend to transcend accents and – to a large extent – poor communication skills.

Videos don’t. They are primarily a vehicle for the presenter to perform and get revenue from his sponsors, and a 30 second instruction set is likely to be a minimum ten minutes long. Heck, if I want to know where the on/off switch is, I don’t really want to hear five minutes of talking as the presenter repeatedly fondles the unopened box before eventually getting round to the unboxing ceremony. And if they have poor communication skills – most do – there’s no telling whereabouts the 10-second segment you want (and which Google directed you to) is in the video timeline, so it’s a pain trying to fast-forward to it. Audio-only versions are even worse.

But anyway, it will be interesting to see how the texting service goes. I’d have no trouble at least trying it, but I can see more problems than solutions, because there is no way they are going to text personal data to you, and I suspect they’ll be even more cautious when they can’t hear you.

I just completed and paid my 2021/22 SA Return.

Once I’d completed it, I was under the impression I was going to have to pay £1,200 now, and another £1,200 by the end of July. Well, I was half right.

It turns out the £2,500 tax refund they gave me last year was in error. They never told me, and at no point did my HMRC account indicate it would be coming back to bite me. Well, it did tonight.

The first payment was actually £2,500 more than I had expected.

To be fair, I couldn’t understand why I got that refund last year, but tax is complicated enough, speaking to HMRC problematic because they are limited in what they can talk about over the phone, and £2,500 is into drooling territory, so I just accepted it. I’ll accept this for the same reasons (with ‘drool’ replaced with ‘puke’ in my evaluation).