"T i m" wrote in message
...

The only person I know who
passed was my next door neighbour who was in her 70s when she had to learn
(or re-learn) to drive after her husband became too ill to drive. Mr H
said
"I am very sorry to have to tell you that I cannot find sufficient grounds
to fail you, so I obliged against my better judgement to pass you."

;-)

Exactly. Talk about grudging praise. I'd forgotten one thing. When he did
the eyesight test, he asked me to read the number of my own car! I said
"well, it's ABC 123A but I know it very well because it's my car - maybe you
should ask me another one". "Don't you get smart with my, lad" he snapped.
He really did have an obnoxious and poisonous personality. There was
evidently no pleasing him.

Apparently he was moved every few years from one test centre to another in
the Home Counties because he kept failing far more than the normal quota
and
was obnoxious to "the public". I imagine if he kept that up, he would have
been disciplined at an "examiner's examination". On my test he gave me an
ambiguous instruction which I asked him to clarify "do you mean turn left
into X street or Y street" and he accused me of showing off my local
knowledge of street names,

He he. My Mrs did similar on her bike test when the examiner (over the
intercom) told her to turn second left whilst counting a shop access
road (that led back onto the road). He couldn't fail her on that as it
wasn't a fault as such.

and on another occasion when I asked him whether
he would want me to turn left or go straight on at a junction some
distance
ahead, so I could get into the correct lane in plenty of time, he blew his
top.

Oh!

When he did eventually tell me, I had to indicate far too late and got
hooted at for pushing in, so I explained *that* was why I'd asked several
hundred yards further back. So that wasn't a realistic fair test.

A mate taking his HGV test was asked to 'pull over here' and he
didn't. The examiner said it again and he didn't, but pulled up a bit
further on.

The examiner asked why he hadn't pulled up when first asked and my
mate said that he, the driver, didn't feel it was safe to do so. The
examiner accepted his answer but just countered that he considered it
safe but wasn't the one driving the vehicle at that time (so had
something bad happened, it would have been my mate, not him who might
have been in trouble).

A trick some say you can / should do on bike tests (where the examiner
follows you on another bike or sometimes a car) is to not filter past
stationary traffic, even though you might normally as that opens up
more opportunities for things to go wrong and more time to do more
stuff with the same risk). ;-)


I'm glad I don't have to take a test today. I'd be fine with the actual
driving, but the hazard-perception tests might be a problem - not because I
can't identify hazards but because the image on the screen is very small and
you are expected to see things in the video earlier than they are visible.
In real life, the problem probably wouldn't apply. That's when I tried the
test on a PC at the Birmingham Motor Show once - technology and screen sizes
have probably improved a lot, but I've heard that they still penalise you if
you identify a potential hazard which the designers of the software hadn't
included.


I like being able to use my local knowledge in a test. When I took my IAM
test, I was asked to take a certain road and I chuckled. The examiner asked
me why, so I said that I knew all about the awkward oblique junction up
ahead where you have to look right back on yourself to check for traffic.
"Can't fool you, can I?" he joked.