Still cruising after all these years

IREMEMBER in the good old days when traffic officials turned a blind eye to transgressions – no matter how big or small. Oh wait. That wasn’t then – it is actually in the present.

While I’m waxing nostalgically, one day back in those days I was driving on my own without a licence at the tender age of 17.

I had matriculated at the time and, believe it or not, was already working at the DFA.

At the time we still had the printing presses on the premises and I had the unenviable job of checking the first edition coming off the press.

For those who don’t really know, working at a newspaper is a 24-hour job. In those days the reporters came in between 8am and 9am to start working on their stories.

Now you have to remember that in those days everything was done on typewriters and lines were drawn on pages where the stories and adverts were to go.

Once this was done – I remember the editorial department was upstairs – we had this “thingy” where you put the page along with the instructions about the page in a capsule then put it in a pipe thingamajig and whoosh it would go downstairs where the typesetters would pick it up and input it into our “computers”.

They would then print out proofs and from there it would be picked up by the printers who would do their hocus pocus and it would eventually end up on the printing press.

It was a long and laborious process and the paper would sometimes only get onto the printing press at about 2am or even 3am. It was a magical feeling seeing all these reams of paper going through the rollers; and eventually the first edition arrived.

You then had to check it with a fine eye because heaven help you if there was a mistake in the headline or if a font had slipped.

Anyway, I was still living at home at the time, and trust me my parents did not want to fetch me at that time of the morning. So after my younger sister was fetched from work, my mother would bring the car to me.

Now while the printers were doing their thing, a colleague and dear friend would stay with me. I won’t go into the details what the two of us got up to during those hours of waiting.

One thing we would do on occasion is take the car and go for a joyride. I need to point out that just as much as I didn’t have a licence, neither did she.

But that didn’t stop us. We would often drive past traffic cops who would just wave at us as we drove by – three quarters of the time we were not even wearing our safety belts.

I eventually got my learner’s licence and continued driving on my own, or with Karen. I only remember one time being stopped by a traffic cop and all he did was check that the licence disc had not expired.

He didn’t even ask me for a licence or notice that I wasn’t wearing a safety belt.

Fast forward to 2017. It has now been suggested that traffic officers work 24 hours a day. Not one traffic officer can be on duty for 24 hours continuously, but you get my drift.

But for what? To do what? Ticket people for parking illegally while turning a blind eye to little children not even strapped in on the back seat? This became a law quite a while ago. No wonder the death toll on our roads is so high and I doubt working a “24-hour shift” is going to change anything.