SPECS FACTOR

The licence officer and Kate don’t see eye-to-eye

Ihad a very confronting experience the other day. I went to renew my driver’s licence, which was about to expire. Stupidly, I thought this involved just paying a fee and maybe having a photo taken.

As I chirpily paid the fee and posed for the picture, the man at VTNZ then motioned me in the direction of one of those machines that you lean your eyes into to read lit-up lines of letters.

“Ummm,” I stammered, seeing nothing but a blurred line of greyish squiggles. “Ahhh, is it K, M, L?” I stopped and looked up at him.

“Are you reading the line I asked you to?” he queried. “Yes,” I replied. “Let me adjust the machine,” he said, scratching his head. “Try again now.”

“Ummm, F? Is it an F? W? Or maybe it’s M?” I looked up at him, heart racing, feeling like an ageing-decayingeyesight excuse of a human.

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s a fail, I’m sorry. You’ll have to come back with a certificate from an optometrist.” I stared at him, aghast. “Yes, you’ve not been able to read a single letter from the line, sooo ...” he tapered off, shuffling papers like I’d become nothing more than a befuddled old person he no longer wanted to deal with.

“Wait,” I pleaded with him. “I wear glasses to see a movie or watch TV, but I’ve never needed them to drive. I mean, my eyesight’s not that bad.”

“Yeah, the test would indicate that it is,” he replied, smiling like an assassin.

“If I run and get my glasses, can I do it again?” I begged. “And if I can read them, will I pass?”

“No, you will have to come back with them and redo it from scratch, and there’ll be an ‘unfit to drive without glasses’ condition attached to your licence,” he said, looking totally over me and my mid-life crisis. “OK,” I skulked. I went home to get my glasses and told the kids of my failure.

“You’re getting old, Mum,” one of them said without a hint of irony or levity.

“It’s karma,” said another who’d failed a restricted licence at the same place and at the time I’d made jokes about it. “You hassled me for failing – now you’re failing.”

“It’s just not meant to be,” said my ever-optimistic daughter, thinking she was offering valuable insight.

“Well, I have to pass because I have to drive,” I announced as I flounced out the door with glasses in hand.

I put them on in the car. Wow, I could actually see so much better. Oh, dear. Perhaps I did need them to drive after all.

“That’s a pass,” the VTNZ officer announced upon my successful read with glasses on. “But your licence will now be conditional on you wearing your glasses.”

The worst part of this experience? It happened the day before my birthday, as if the universe was saying, “Yep, you’re a whole year older!”