On 07/04/2021 14:25, NY wrote:
"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.

I have done the hazard perception test for real. Although I passed my
test in 1984, I actually trained as an instructor in 2009 - although I
never took it up, as the Engineering market picked up again and I got a
job a few days before I was due to start teaching.

I found the problem to be that I had to be careful not to identify some
hazards that they had not identified as such and not to identify the
required ones too early.

The allowed band may be fine for learners, but it is way too late for
experienced drivers.

I know that when driving normally, I often point out a car to my
passenger(s) and say that I think that they are about to do something
stupid - and invariably they do. I don't know exactly what is triggering
me, but I have clearly learned through experience to identify some
subtle cues that I cannot even consciously identify.