LEARNER DRIVER

LEARNER DRIVER

To drive in NYC you need a NY state permit if you reside here. No other permit, even if it is a Nobel Careful Prize for Driving, will do. Like everything else in NYC, applying for the permit takes hours of form filling and queueing up at municipal offices. No matter how experienced a driver you are you must take all the tests and start from scratch. Cliche Malone reporting for duty here but it really is Kafka-esque. There are three levels you must pass before you can reach the Place of the Permit. Each level is fraught with dangers and boringness but you must unlock the secrets to move up.

Our super efficient relocation guru Rafaela makes us get up and go to places with queues at 7.30 a.m. It's brutal but we are always at the front. Of the three getting your NY permit levels, Level One is learner application day. We started very early because there was a total of 4 queues. Level One includes form filling, a photo, payment, mini-interview, written test.  You must not show any exasperation with any city officials or queues at all by the way, or you get sent to the back/ejected completely. It's as much an exercise in self control as it is driving knowledge.

Level Two is a 5 hour lecture at a driving school, with two mid 1980s videos on wearing seatbelts and not driving drunk, plus two more written tests. Usually takes place in the evening, it was my turn last night. There was another elderly woman there who had been driving for donkeys years to do the shouting for me but MAN ALIVE it was dull. I nearly cried and not with joy or emotion. At the end I got a certificate.

Level Three is an actual driving test with an examiner. I haven't a hope in Hades of passing. The examiner will be a man no doubt, so that's a bad start. Next, apparently they just bash the dashboard and  say 'Turn left here'. Well, sorry but I can't take that kind of instruction from a man, in a car.  I must not, under any circumstances argue with the examiner or say, "What here?" "Are you sure?" etc. Then I will have to do a 3 POINT TURN and parallel park. If men appear on the pavement when I am trying to parallel park in normal circumstances, I tell them to, ahem, clear off. What's it going to be like trying to impress a man with my ability to parallel park? Impossible. That's what. I will need some kind of happy pill first or to be hypnotised. "I must respect the male driving examiner" Going to try repeating this mantra to myself for the next few weeks but I know it's futile....