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).