Those testy testers really do drive us demented

IT was reported yesterday that 36,000 learner drivers who had their tests cancelled during the early stages of lockdown are now being offered appointments. Given the report from the Road Safety Authority about complaints against testers released last week, I wonder how many of those 36,000 will be punching the air round about now.

According to the RSA’s data, there have been just 20 complaints about driving tests in the first half of this year. That’s a huge slump from the figure of 986 complaints last year. You’d probably need to have been living on a meteorite for the past six months not to realise that those figures don’t represent a miraculous improvement in the behaviour and attitude of driving testers. The testers haven’t got nicer, they just went away for a while. But now they’re back. Let the earth, and its learner drivers, tremble.

Amongst the complaints received by the RSA, there was a tester who refused to accept an offered handshake, one who mocked a test candidate for getting lost on the way to the test centre (before refusing to proceed with the test) and a tester who flung himself back in the passenger seat every time the candidate braked gently.

That’s my favourite because I had one of them. I’m wondering if it was the same man. In addition to throwing himself back at (literally) every turn, my man accompanied his grand gestures with loud gasps and wincing facial expressions. I’m not sure now if that was the same tester who, once we returned to the test centre, informed me that ‘you won’t be surprised to learn you’ve failed’, because they all blend into one big blob of bad manners in my memory now. I do know that I responded to those glad tidings by replying, ‘no sh**, Sherlock’. And that – like every driving test in history – it was a thoroughly miserable, badtempered affair.

Think about it: has anyone ever driven away from a driving test – even a successful one – and thought, what a charming individual? Has anyone ever suggested meeting up again to their tester? Has a single love story ever begun in a driving test? I suspect not.

When I did my first test, my driving instructor warned me that the tester would ‘pretend to put crosses in boxes’ to put me off. I remember then thinking I had entered a hellish world, in which adults would deliberately try to trick nervous people into screwing up. Sure enough, that tester appeared to my eyes to tick way more boxes than he actually did. In fact, I only failed my first test by a single tick, but once I saw the tester apparently developing repetitive strain injury with his pen, I more or less gave up trying.

Later, in a test when I really did give up trying, I put the car radio on to drown out the tester’s wheezing and unpleasantness until we could both return to the centre and be rid of each other. I had another one who was such a large man that he sort of poured over the sides of the passenger seat and impeded my access to the gear lever.

THAT was a great day for Ireland. I have a friend who failed his test when he opened his passenger window a crack because both driver and tester were sweating so profusely the windscreen was fogging up too fast for the vents to clear it.

A colleague tells me that a week after his father, a garda, had aced the rigorous detective driving test for highspeed precision driving, he failed the regular test. ‘Do you want me to tell you why you failed?’ asked the tester. ‘You needn’t f***ing bother,’ came the understandable reply.

I did eventually pass my driving test, about 20 years after I took my first one. When we returned to the centre, the tester didn’t say a word while he filled out what appeared to be way too many forms. I gazed at the ceiling until eventually he told me to sign one of the forms. I did. Still nothing. I gazed around again. Then, after a ridiculously long pause, he tapped the paper I’d just signed and told me I’d passed. I think he thought I’d already known that because it said so quite clearly on the form I’d just signed. In that moment, of unexpected triumph, I thought it better not to tell him that I couldn’t see what I’d just signed because I didn’t have my glasses.

I think he might have been aiming for a big reveal. Or else, like apparently every other driving tester in history, he just wanted to make his victim suffer a little longer. If you’re one of the 36,000, good luck! You’re going to need it.