Driving Miss Crazy

Have you given up on me yet?

I know. I deserve it. 14 days sans a peep warrants your disillusionment, your disenchantment, possibly even your disownment. But before you write me off forever, before you put your spiteful pen to divorce paper, consider this....

I'm in the early stages of getting my UK driver's licence (you're intrigued, right? Right?). Step 1 was learning that the word "license" does not have an s. If only that were where the mind numbing ended, but far from it.

See, in this little hamlet we call England, getting a licence as a U.S. expat is a right pain in the arse. If you took getting a bank account, combined it with that whole TV licence nonsense and threw in a dash of good old-fashioned heavy machinery operation (only on the wrong side of the....um, factory), then you'll at least be closer to understanding just how big a pain in the arse it is.

In America, they let donkeys drive cars. Okay, maybe that's not true, but they might as well. In some states, you barely have to be out of the womb to operate the sort of farm equipment that removes attractive men's appendages on a regular basis (if you believe the movies, which of course I do).

On my 16th birthday, I took my test at the Northbrook, Illinois DMV with a very recently torn medial meniscus in my right knee (I removed the brace in the parking lot beforehand). Though I could barely move my leg, I passed. I passed the written test too: My driver's ed teacher, some obese sweaty man named John whose lessons involved me driving from one suburban drive-through takeout place to the next, had told me all of the answers, including the very educational instruction that "Number 10 is always C" (complete with pneumonic device, "Tennessee.")

An hour after starting my testing process, I drove unceremoniously out of the DMV with my new license in tow. It didn’t matter that for the next 48 hours, I proceeded to terrorize the neighbourhood with my incredibly inept driving. It was irrelevant that on the second day of having my license, I hit a parked car. All that mattered was that I had achieved my god-given right as an American to seek my manifest destiny on the nation’s roads.

See, in America, at least in those days, nobody really cared if we couldn't drive worth a damn. Nobody minded if we didn't actually know the answers to that tedious test. That was The Man's test, and damn The Man! We are Americans! We are frontiersman, and we need to explore the open frontier! We have the unalienable right to go out and be fruitful and prosper (using fuel-guzzling SUVs of course), and so help us, we won't let some silly test get in the way of our journey! Besides, what better way to learn how to drive than by just driving! It's the mightly US of A, and you know, that's just how we do.

Not so here in GB, it seems. They appear take a much more conservative point of view on the activity of driving. They call it a "privilege." It's all about safety and control and not hitting objects or people and blah blah blah zzzzz......

Not only that, but they seem to think we Americans can’t drive (the gall!!)….so much so that while all of the Europeans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the South Africans, the New Zealanders, etc etc etc can just turn in their respective licences for a UK one upon arriving here, the Americans have to start from scratch. We actually have to endure the indignity of applying for a provisional license, which is a fancy English-person way of saying Learner’s Permit, which is a fancy American way of saying, “You can’t drive without your dad.”

Once you go through the long process of getting your provisional license, then you have to take what by all accounts is a very difficult two-part written test with like 10 million questions and a video portion. Then, on a different day, you have to take a really difficult 40-MINUTE driving test. I mean, can I bring a book-on-tape? What the hell are we going to do for 40 minutes?

Not only that, but to add insult to injury (or hopefully in this case, lack of injury), I read today that you have to bring a spare rearview mirror so that the instructor can see behind you. Which is good because you know, in moving over here, I got rid of 90 percent of my belongings, but I kept a whole box of extra rearview mirrors, just in case. You would think that if they needed them, maybe they’d, I don’t know, keep an extra few around the DMV...? Even Alex thought that was ridiculous (I quote: “In my day, examiners were able to turn around in their chairs.”)

Anyway, I have so much more to say on the subject, but I’ll stop for now. Might as well string out the content so that I can get over here more than once a fortnight. Stay turned to the Show for more on my impending attempt to be allowed to do something I’ve been doing for 15 years. Not that I’m bitter….