Where the Keyboard Meets the Road

In order to keep a traffic ticket off my record, I recently tried traffic school online. This was a positive experience because I wasn’t forced to sit in a hotel conference room with people who obviously received both their driver’s licenses and their high school diplomas from boxes of Cracker Jacks.

I realize that my comment makes me sound like I’m being judgmental and thinking I’m better than the people with whom I previously attended traffic school. Well, that’s probably because I am, and I do. It frightens me to know that some of the people I saw there live in my same community and are probably still undiagnosed.

Online traffic school was also a negative experience because both my computer and the testing system is pitiful. If I think back a bit to before this, I can see that my attitude actually went south a few weeks earlier when I got the ticket in the first place.

I was driving on a residential street that connects two major thoroughfares, so very few people actually drive the posted limit. I was on my way to church, and I was in a hurry to work with the youth, on a program I had written for them.

I couldn’t argue because I was speeding a little, but I really wanted to blurt out, “I’m a cripple on my way to church, and I was only going five miles over the limit! What is wrong with this picture?” What I did instead was smile and say, “Thank you,” and drive the rest of the way slowly.

The questions in the online traffic school test are really quite simple, but I must question some of their validity. A question that asks what color the car was on the first page of the online and handbook is obviously there to see if you’ve read the pages before trying to take the test. The page in question was one of the pages I actually did read, but I not only didn’t notice what color the car was in the picture, I don’t remember even looking at the picture.

Another question asked what speed the speedometer showed on a specific picture of a dashboard. This turned out to be a trick question because the speedometer in the picture showed zero. Questions like this leave me wondering if the online test was written by people out of work due to the television writers’ strike. I can see the minds that write for late-night talk shows constructing tests like this.

Once you’re finished with the test, if you fail, you can retake the test as many times as necessary. You are only limited by five hours and your own endurance. They randomized the order of the questions and must have several extra questions that rotate into the test. I know this because I almost ran out of time and lost count of how many tries I made. After the first failure, I started writing down my answers and whether I got them right or wrong. The process of elimination eventually netted me the correct answers.

The whole experience was as unnerving, and I don’t think I learned anything except that I should pay attention to my dashboard and the colors of cars, rather than the road.