Diary Of An ADI

The Toronto Sun makes a comment about the standard of driving in Canada. The article is about 120 words long, and doesn’t actually say much other than a national poll saying 75% of Canadians think driving standards are worse than 50 years ago. And this needed a poll?

I think the Canadians have been taking lessons from the UK on how to state the obvious.

Far more interesting is Canada’s massive problems with racism and prejudice. Take a look at some of the comments that people have left at the foot of that story. If you said any of that stuff in the UK you’d be arrested.

Mind you, a couple of comments did ring a bell with what happens over here:

Bad driving habits? Talk to the stupid people who brake driving uphill, the idiots who do 20 under the speed limit, causing a huge line up of cars behind them, the jerks who do not turn off their high beams when coming at you at nightime. Or how about the tools that dont know how to park, people who rip up ahead on a bottleneck road and force their way in, when people have been waiting for minutes already. [edited by DOAADI for racist rant]

Another favourite of mine are the people who brake because someone in another lane puts on their brakes. Most people are sheep and do not focus on driving. I drove professionally for years. It is near impossible to make a decent living driving in the Toronto area.

A lot of that could almost be taken from here, couldn’t it?

It’s quite frightening, but they are being serious.

This article reports that blind people were put behind the wheel of manual cars on a test track in Cologne. For some inexplicable reason, it is deemed boastworthy that the fastest one of these blind drivers got the car “up to 74mph”.

The article suggests:

Teaching the blind to drive is an increasingly realistic goal as cameras and sensors become sophisticated and cheap enough that they might one day substitute for sight.

The rough translation of this is as follows: having cameras and computers reliable enough to be a substitute for sight is many, many years off – even if it happens at all.

Ford apparently saw the event as “empowering blind and visually impaired drivers”.

I remember once someone reported that blind people were being taught to drive with the aid of a guide dog in the passenger seat, which was trained to bark once for “turn left” and twice for “turn right”.

The number of people who believed it was amazing. It was published on April 1st.

An American article, but very relevant to the UK – and anywhere else where driving lessons are conducted.

The article says that better drivers are frequently the product of better-quality driving schools. It doesn’t really expand upon this, being mainly an advisory in the popular mode (the UK media is no better), but the tag line is definitely valid.

I guess the instructor involved in what I saw this afternoon should take note. I’d picked up a pupil for a lesson, and as we were waiting at the end of his street to emerge I saw another learner car go by – and I recognised the driver. A few weeks ago he’d put his lessons on hold to concentrate on his studies (this sometimes happens a lot at this time of year). I’d obviously been at pains to find out if it was anything I’d done at that time, and he assured me it wasn’t.

When I saw this today, I texted him a little later and asked if it was him I’d seen. He said it was, and that this instructor was giving him a few lessons over the summer holidays. I again asked if it was anything I’d done (good instructors are paranoid about things like this), and he telephoned me to assure me it was absolutely nothing to do with me, but his mum was paying and this instructor had told her that her son shouldn’t stop driving otherwise he’d forget everything and never get started again.

That is an absolute load of crap.

The instructor in question must be really desperate for work to have to resort to this type of unprofessional behaviour (Heaven knows what other things were said). It’s a shame such antics don’t get you kicked off the register, because they should.

One thing is certain: you get what you pay for, and someone so desperate for work that they drop prices and provide inaccurate information in order to steal it from other people really are worth even less than that!

The funny part is, though, that my diary is full up. So I guess the last laugh is mine. Of course, my ex-pupil will suffer because he wasn’t far away from test standard, and this cowboy is going to milk him for the summer.

This is an OLD story.

I mentioned recently that Autoglass was getting rid of 400 jobs.

As a follow-up, a reader has provided the following information (copied exactly as submitted):

The 300 permanent staff that Autoglass are making redundant are having their contracts breached. Autoglass are paying in lieu of notice which by law as to be in your contract, there is nothing in our contracts outlining redundancy. So they have to serve our notice which makes us entitled to benefits and so on, but we aren’t getting them. Pay in lieu of notice terminates our employment today the 15th July 2011. All 300 staff are entitled to take Autoglass to an employment tribunal or even to a civil court for breach of contract.

I stress that this is a comment submitted by a reader.