I mentioned back in June that Beeston Test Centre was moving away from the Beeston Business Park. Good riddance to the place, and that stupid cow in reception who made sure that DVSA and ADIs were made as unwelcome as possible. I’ll miss the couple who run the cafe and the friendly black cat in the security building (security staff were OK, too), but that’s all.
Tests are now being conducted out of The Village Hotel in Chilwell, and after less than a week there are already problems.
Referring to my earlier report, DVSA noted:
…access to ‘The Village Hotel Nottingham’ venue is only available to those candidates attending for test; you won’t be allowed to use this site for practice either during or outside of working hours (including weekends)
My comment in the same article was:
I can guarantee that there will be some arseholes who ignore that and try to practice bay park in there.
I have it on good authority that The Village is already unhappy due to the number of complaints from its patrons about driving school cars blocking the car parks at all hours of the day, and that there is a very real risk that DVSA will get kicked out before a permanent relocation can be secured.
Let’s make no mistake here. The Village has always been a snobbish place (trust me, I used to go in there as a guest not long after it was first built) and like most gyms and health clubs it attracts chavs (albeit ones with aspirations to being middle class) who would complain about anything. But just as The Village has its sizable clutch of Village Idiots ready to exaggerate matters, I think I have made it abundantly clear over the years that the driving instruction industry – I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it a “profession” – is literally bursting at the seams with people who are capable of providing more than enough inconvenience to the public for complaints to be raised. I saw several the last time I was at The Village, just driving around after all the tests had gone out, and the only reason they didn’t try bay parking there and then was that you can’t find more than two adjacent bays free at a time during the day, and no ADI I’ve ever seen parks next to anyone. Oh dear no.
DVSA itself is partly to blame for this. It began at Colwick a few years ago, when ADIs were turning up to practice bay parking while tests were starting and ending and getting in everybody’s way. Sometimes, there were more halfwits practising bay parking than there were candidates on test, and that is no exaggeration. It was getting beyond a joke, so the centre manager put signs up telling people to stay away – a futile gesture, since most ADIs can’t read anyway, and it had little effect. The last straw for me came when one of my pupils picked up a serious fault during the bay park exercise for being too close to a parked car, which just happened to be one of these dickheads. I made an official complaint that these people were demonstrably influencing some test scores, and it was taken seriously at test centre level.
It was referred higher within DVSA, and then the bombshell was dropped by the idiot of an area manageress, who decreed that she couldn’t stop people coming into the test centre car park since it was a public facility (or some such description). The test centre was ordered to remove the notices telling people to keep out, and ever since then these inadequate ADIs who cannot teach properly anywhere else have been allowed to come and go as they please.
So, DVSA created a problem in not setting boundaries for ADIs. The situation is analogous to keeping a cobra as a pet – no matter how long you have it, how much you feed it, it will still bite you if you try to get friendly with it. ADIs are DVSA’s own pet cobra – and DVSA still insists on trying to get chummy with it rather than treat as the dumb and dangerous animal it is. The upshot is that whatever DVSA says ADIs should or shouldn’t do, many of them will deliberately – with malice aforethought – do exactly the opposite. And DVSA is stupid enough to let them get away with it.
Anyone who has driven into The Village car park with a pupil who is not on test is an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to remain on The Register. Their actions are a gnat’s whisker away from having tests anywhere near Beeston suspended until a permanent site is found.