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Back in 2019, I embarked on a long-simmering self-improvement project: I would finally — finally! — get my driver’s licence.
I even wrote a column about it, which you can read here. If you don’t want to read it (how dare you), to summarize, very quickly: I have been trying to get my licence since I was 16. My learner’s permit is so old it predates Manitoba’s graduated licensing program, which came into effect nearly 20 years ago. (I will note here that I passed that bad boy on the first try.)
I had a string of automatic fails (or “critical errors”) as a teenager, then another one in my 20s. I deeply wish I could tell you that Test No. 5 — the test at which I burst into tears and threw my torn-up paperwork like a fistful of confetti on the waiting-room table after failing the parallel parking portion — also happened when I was a teenager, but I was definitely 31.
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Now, those of you who remember the column — and I know there’s a few of you because I’ve received multiple requests for an update since starting this newsletter — know that I was unsuccessful. I failed Test No. 6, which was a bummer because it was the test for which I felt the most prepared. I did a month of in-car instruction, including a pre-test refresher class. But it was yet another “critical error” that got me, this time on a left turn.
Jen in the driver’s seat after a test in 2019. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files)
Here’s what happened: I briefly lost my mind and turned left on a solid green before yielding to the oncoming vehicles (I know!), which is objectively dangerous (I know!). My test administrator, however, was remarkably cool about it. MPI administers something like 600 Class 5 road tests a week, and I marvel at the steel nerves of people who willingly get into the passenger seat beside a nervous novice driver who hesitantly steers a Honda Civic directly into oncoming traffic.
But I got back in the driver’s seat after that because, as I wrote at the time, you fail 100 per cent of the road tests you don’t take — though, if you’re me, then you fail 100 per cent of the road tests you do take.
Which brings me to the update: I regret to report I failed not one, but two more tests in 2019. One in August (automatic fail, left turn again), and another in October (automatic fail, left turn AGAIN — apparently, I am Derek Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s male model character who also cannot turn left ).
The October test is a heartbreaker because it was almost a unicorn test — no general errors (you are permitted a maximum of 10) and no critical errors (which is ideal, as you are permitted a maximum of zero). A clean sheet.
And then, in the last five minutes of the test, an improper approach on a left turn cost me. “I really thought you were going to be my first-ever perfect test,” my administrator told me on the way back inside.
I wish I knew what happens to my brain during a road test. In non-graded situations, I am a good driver (I swear!). I’m calm. I love rules, so I’m also quite safe. I note every crosswalk and railway crossing. I parallel park like a boss. But as soon as we’re in a test situation, I choke.
An in-car instructor — a young med student whose name I’ve misplaced but whose wisdom I will remember forever — got the closest to determining the problem. “I notice that whenever you make a tiny mistake, you fixate on it and then end up making more mistakes,” he told me. “You need to just acknowledge the mistake and move on.” I absolutely do that — and not just on the road. We bonded over test stress: I was preparing for a road test. He was preparing for the MCAT. Bless his heart for making it seem like those two things are at all the same.
And then the pandemic happened, so my driver’s-licence dreams were put on the back-burner — in part because road tests were periodically suspended, but also because it felt less urgent, especially during those first few months of the pandemic when rush hour was eerily quiet. We were staying home, and the world moved to remote. I could worry less about getting to from Point A to B because I could do most things from Point A.
Now, as the world has reopened, I’m feeling the pull again — especially after taking my first Winnipeg Transit ride in two years (it’s not as bad as I remembered it being, but it’s not exactly efficient, either). But it looks like I’ll have to wait: earlier this month, the Free Press reported that 10,000 Manitobans are stuck in test gridlock, with appointments stretching into late summer owing to both the pandemic and seasonal delays. (Fun fact: the photo accompanying that article is, indeed, of my first 2019 road test.)
I was 34 in 2019. I’m 37 now. My new goal is to get my driver’s licence before I turn 40 — or, if that doesn’t happen, at least before my niece gets hers. She’s currently six years old.
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