First time at the not-DMV

Having felt that there just hadn't been enough to worry about in my life recently what with the whole business of buying a house and my parents arriving tomorrow, I went down to the RMV this morning to get a learner's permit for driving. I hadn't really planned the visit much in advance, only having said that I might go at some point in the next while, and had done very little preparation - I downloaded and read the drivers' manual on the bus on the way there. It had occurred to me that this time, I wouldn't have the advantage of seventeen years of picked up knowledge behind me, and unlike the rest of the country I wouldn't automatically know what colour a regulation sign was or what the various road markings meant, but during the couple of practice tests that I mentioned in the last post, it seemed that the general approach of it was just to make sure that you weren't a total moron, and apart from the different shaped road signs, everything looked fairly comparable to what I was used to.

Like all American governmental departments I've seen (which is more than most people have to in this country), on arrival they give you a ticket and then keep you sweating in a row of benches while waiting for your number to come up, occasionally ringing an electronic bell and flashing up letters and sequences of numbers on the screens around you like you're at the world's drabbest Bingo hall. Having been assigned to the C-class personnel, it seemed that my queue moved most slowly, while they absolutely rattled through the As and Bs, but during the time it took for the five or so C-numbers in front of me to be dealt with, I took the chance to look over the vehicle regulations again, noticing that it advised such things as "make sure your vehicle operates good", being one of the few educational publications directed by Derek Zoolander.

Even though I had been calm and unbothered about the level at which I was to be quizzed, the process of even getting to the test is like being interviewed by an elderly Gestapo member in a wooly cardigan. I'm sure I saw a few people in front of me being turned away for not meeting the requirements, but I had brought a whole envelope full of evidence in preparation for their strict rules on needing three separate documents that showed social security number (the original card), proof of signature (my permanent resident card), proof of residence (after some rifling, a mortgage update from the bank) and proof of birth (I'm standing here now). With your whole life plotted out on to their computer, further testing is done right at the counter.

The eye test got off to a rocky start when I failed to find the eye testing equipment - rather than an optician's chart somewhere across the room, you have to stoop down and peer into a sort of Viewmaster mounted on the desk. Looking into this, I had to read out numbers on a background that were visible only to my left or right eye, then pick out another number sequence in a kind of ghostly lighted grid pattern, which I could only just do. Then came the worst part - she switched on an LED at the periphery of vision, and asked me what colour it was.

"I don't bloody know," I didn't say. I can see colour-vital things in the road perfectly fine because the reds and greens they use are very distinct, but if you're going to ask me what colour something is, don't show me a pinprick of light at twenty degrees past my field of vision. Hoping for the best, I guessed "red".
"No - there's a light on the edge of your vision, what colour is it?"
I turned my eyes directly to it, hoping that that would offer me some help. "Sort of... yellow-orange?"
"No - there's a light on the edge of your vision, what colour is it?"
"Green?"
"Yes."

And that's how they ensure your colour vision is accurate - just keep on asking until you get it right, like a less impatient Granny's Garden, and it doesn't matter that you've just apparently demonstrated that when encountering a traffic light you're going to just go as fast as possible no matter what it's showing. With that safely out of the way, I was pointed to a glass-walled room where - in an arrangement much like the British theory tests - a number of touch-screen workstations were set up with the testing software, and it told me that I needed to attain the generous pass mark of 18 out of 25.

And things started off very well. I recognized the first couple of questions from the drivers' manual and could have answered them very easily anyway with only a bit of common sense, but I didn't know that the machine had a trick up its sleeve - just as you're getting used to the process, it'll suddenly bring you to a dead halt with an irrelevant statistics question. Staring at the first one, it felt like the Bridge of Death from Monty Python - "What... do you do at a Yield sign? What... are the indicators for? What... is the percentage of accidents on the freeway that are caused by drunk driving?" In what way does the last one imply anything about my ability to operate a car? And that wasn't the worst of them - there were the occasional questions about the maximum penalties for speeding and alcohol-related incidents for drivers between the ages of 16 and 21. I struggled through them with guesswork and inference from the questions it had asked before (unlike the British test, you're immediately told whether you were right or wrong and a running total is kept at the bottom of the screen), and was relieved when it seemed to calm down again and offered up some road signs instead.

Despite the machine's best efforts, I passed the theory test with 20 right, having only failed to guess the average age of drunk drivers and the height of the occasional dam in Kazakhstan, and joined the younger girl who had been taking the test beside me in the queue to get the licence handed out while talking about the stupidity of half of the questions. You don't get a card for it - instead I have a rather pathetic slip of paper that tells people I'm a licensed learner driver and includes a photograph that makes me look no more than 90% like an escaped murderer, and I was out of the building in no more than an hour and a half.

I now, once again, have two years to organize and pass the driving test.