I was backing up some stuff on my hard drive when I stumbled across the below. I wrote it a couple of years ago.
It is long. Sorry.
Driver’s Retraining Class
My Experience
I had to take Driver’s Retraining Class after receiving two speeding tickets in the space of a year. I thought that was not a lot of tickets to require a drivers retraining class. I’ve explained this to some people and have received different responses from them every time.
Some people think you’re only supposed to have to take the class after three tickets and I shouldn’t have had to take it. Some people think it’s because the tickets were for excessive speed. I asked those people what excessive was, but they didn’t know.
The reality, according to the person who taught the class, is this:
There are no guidelines for who a judge or court might decide have to take the class. It’s all on a whim. These might be the only truly fair decisions; ones made completely arbitrarily.
It was held in a classroom at CCRI in Warwick. I felt kind of stupid going into a building where people were taking real classes. Bettering themselves. I was there, why? Because I was speeding to Krispy Kreme or some damned thing.
The inside of the classroom was like the inside of any classroom. Having not been in one in a long time, and never really having been in one that was full of only adults, I was curious what the atmosphere would be like.
Most of us were there about fifteen minutes prior to 6 p.m., when the class was scheduled to start. There wasn’t a lot of talking. There was the same kind of curiosity I remember feeling going into any other class, only with one difference. When you’re a kid and you’re in a class for the first time, you know who the students are, and you know who the teacher is. Kids, kids, kids… and one adult. You knew the teacher as soon as they walked in.
Here it was different. Any person who walked through the door could be the teacher, no matter how old or freaky or anything.
Crusty looking guy walks in with a long blonde goatee and long blonde hair stuffed under a knit cap woven in a rising flame pattern. Could be him. Why not? Could be.
How about the gray-mullet-headed guy with the Patriots sweatshirt, jacket, sweatpants and, probably, undergarments? Why not him?
I know people were looking at me like I could have been the teacher, and I’ve got a tattoo on my head.
It quickly becomes apparent that gray-mullet-headed guy is not the teacher. He’s the guy who, at 5:55 p.m. wonders if the class will be canceled and will we still get credit if the teacher doesn’t show up by 6:15.
He’s also the guy who cannot believe he had to miss work to attend the "frigging class". He mumbles something about lost wages and about “only a couple of DUIs”.
This gets the rest of the class talking as they all realize they have similar circumstances. These circumstances range from those that are at most mildly annoying (I’ll put my own in that category) to down-right disturbing.
Captured here are come quotes I hear floating around from these conversations.
“Spent six hours in jail…”
“I didn’t know my license had been suspended for three years…”
“Cop pulls me out of the car…”
“Not fair that the cops can be on the street without their lights on. How am I supposed to know it’s a cop?”
“100 dollar ticket…”
“300 dollar ticket…”
“750 in fines…”
“13,000 in damages…”
I find it’s kind of like showing people pictures of your kid. I find pictures of my daughter endlessly enjoying. I can look at them and relive what was going on when they were taken and feel the emotions attached and just have a great time. I know other people, after a short while, get really bored.
Suddenly, it’s like a room full of people who were showing each other pictures of their kids. The conversations quickly run their course, and no one wants to get really, really chummy with the other mopes in this class, so silence more or less takes over again.
There are a couple of guys who seem to not only have and endless supply of stories about traffic related run-ins with the law, but an endless capacity to enjoy recounting and hearing them. They hang tough and go on and on and on.
Good for them. They’re passing time better than the rest of us.
Finally, the person who is going to teach the class walks in, and I realize what I thought before about how anyone could have been the teacher, was wrong. She is an older lady, with glasses, but I think the big bag of manuals she was carrying really gives it away.
Gray-mullet-headed guy immediately asks if we will be getting out early.
“Nice.” she says. “Why is that always the first question? Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me how my day was or something? Maybe offer to get me a coffee.”
Lamely, gray-mullet-headed guy asks how her day was. She does not respond.
Someone’s cell phone rings shrilly. It is a simply horrible rendition of Breaking the Habit by Linkin Park. Man. It’s really bad. The teacher uses this as a handy segue into telling us the first rule is that all cell phones should be off.
Have you been in a room lately where 25 or so people all turn their cell phones off at the same time? Five years ago, if you heard this, you would have though Laurie Anderson was performing somewhere close by, or that aliens were attacking.
Beeps, trills, voices, samples of women moaning, and horrible, horrible music build to a crescendo, then quiet.
The teacher takes roll call. During the roll calling, she sometimes has to verify some bit of information about the person who’s name she just called. Flame-hat guy was born in ’75? Good lord. He’s taken himself down a rough damned road.
Flame-hat hears a name he thinks he recognizes and relocates himself to go sit near the name’s owner. He begins a normal, this-is-my-living-room tone of voice conversation with the other guy about possible other, other guys they might both know.
He does not notice at all that the teacher has stopped calling names and is staring at him.
This goes on for what I think was a really long time. Like 30 seconds. I feel just like I’m in high school again.
Speaking of feeling like I’m in high school, I really feel like I’m in high school because I’m being a giant dork and scribbling observations about everything that happens into a notebook. Oh well. Dork it up, I say.
Eventually, flame-hat catches on and roll call is finished. The teacher then starts the class by saying, “There are a lot of reasons why someone might take this class. People choose to take the class to lower their insurance or to make themselves safer drivers. People are also court-ordered to take this class. Looking around the room at the faces in here, I’m going to guess you were all court-ordered.”
What the hell was that? What kind of thing is that to say? Then I take a good look around the room, and decide I agree with her.
She begins talking about various topics and the conversation quickly degrades to how unfair it is that the police are able to drive however they want and never end up in a class like this.
A big pusher of this kind of talk is House-Plates guy. More on House-Plates guy later, but he is named such because his father is in government, on some level, and therefore House-Plates guy has House Plates on his car. He is confused as to why he still gets pulled over for breaking the law, even though he has House Plates on his car.
The teacher makes a valiant effort to get those in the class to realize that they are in the class for an infraction and should try their best to come out of it with something positive. It was a good try.
We get to the point in the class where we start to talk about accidents. Why they happen and what the consequences are. There are clippings from newspapers in the manual she gave us and we read along as she reads aloud, “One killed and one injured in Friday night collision”.
Apparently, someone was weaving back and forth over the dividing yellow line and caused an accident on some Friday night. She asks for possible reasons why this driver might have been weaving back and forth over the dividing yellow line.
“He was drunk” someone offers.
“He was sleepy” someone else adds.
I wanted to say, “He was receiving oral favors.”, but decided not to.
Someone else says he was maybe playing with the radio.
Then flame-hat guy says, “Maybe he was trying to commit suicide.”
The teacher looks at him levelly and says, “Come on. Let’s keep it light, okay? Now the next headline, “Car slams into bus, killing two.””
She seems to have no idea at all that what she just said was really, really funny. No one else seems to get it, either. It’s one of those moments where I find myself saying to myself, “Maybe it isn’t them. Maybe it’s me who is totally off.”
Class progresses. Flame-hat guy is quickly revealing himself to be someone who I would not at all like to go to a movie with or, in fact, be in the same theater with, ever, ever. He is the kind of guy who has no gate between his brain and his mouth. Any thought that occurs to him, comes right out of his mouth without first checking to see if it should have been allowed out.
Sometimes, the thoughts come out, and you can see, they’re lost. They don’t know where they are or what they are doing or why they were allowed out of the mouth. These thoughts could frequently be seen walking up to other students asking if they could direct them to the point they were to be associated with. I see a lot of shrugged shoulders and these thoughts all go to the same corner and sort of mill around for a while looking sheepish.
We’re in the middle of a conversation being driven mercilessly into the land of No One Gives a Ding-Dang by Flame-hat guy when House-Plates guy chimes in with something so off topic even Flame-hat guy seems taken aback.
House-Plates guy asks the teacher, “How many of these classes do you teach?”
She responds, “One a month.”
“Where does the money go?” he ponders.
“Excuse me?”
“The money we all had to pay to take this class. There’s 2750 dollars in this class right now. What does the state do with all that money?” He says this in a very authoritative tone of voice. He says this in a voice which expects the rest of the class to jump up and go, “YEAH! Good question! Just where DOES all this money go?” But no one does.
The teacher blows this off as a stupid waste of time, as she should have. What’s interesting, to me anyway, is that there are 26 people in the class and that each student pays 125 dollars for the class.
House-Plates guy does not seem to have a future in either politics or accounting.
We’re going to get two five-minute breaks instead of three ten-minute breaks and therefore get out at 9:30 instead of 10. I’m cool with this as is the rest of the class. Learning so, we go off for our first five-minute break.
Teacher admonishes us that we must all be back within five-minutes.
House-Plates guy comes back after 15 minutes. Much later than anyone else. He is totally the last person back in the class, and by a good margin. The teacher is less impressed with this than she was with his foray into the budgetary concerns of the state.
Before he gets back, though, she is wondering where he is and Flame-hat guy rats on him for leaving the building to have a smoke, although she specifically said not to do that.
I no longer feel like I’m in high school. Now I feel like I’m in third-grade. Only there’s smoking.
When he does get back she asks him if he had left the building for a cigarette. He says there is no way at all he did that and that he only went to the bathroom. As he is sitting right in front of me, it’s difficult for me to miss the rancid stink of new cigarette smoke. Maybe he has a future in politics after all.
We come to the section where we talk about seatbelts and why they should be worn. I never used to wear my seatbelt.
In 1995 I was working for a group home. Teenage runaways, drug addicts and general problem types.
One night, a girl I had worked with ran away from the program. She met up with some friends of hers, they all got blasted and drove their car into the side of a building at some ridiculous speed.
The girl was thrown from the back of the car and flew fifty feet or so into a telephone pole, head first.
Most of the kids who were in this place, most kids who are messed up, are messed up because their parents are messed up. This girl was no exception.
Her mother insisted on an open casket funeral even though they could not get the girls head back into the shape of a head.
I attended the funeral. I saw her in her casket. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. I’ve worn mine ever since.
We complete seatbelt section and come to our second break.
We are told we are all allowed to leave for five minutes, but that House-Plate guy has to stay behind due to his using so much time on the first break.
I need to interject here. Remember that this is an adult I am talking about and that we are talking about the loss of a five minute break Just remember.
He does not, quite, freak out. He composes himself, he actually has to compose himself, and says, “Excuse me? Excuse me, ma’am? Are you kidding? You must be kidding.”
“No.” she says, “I’m not kidding.”
“That is completely unfair. Completely unfair. I cannot believe you are doing this.”
I’m going to try to keep myself from exaggerating, but this quickly escalates. Everyone else who was going to leave the classroom stopped and watched.
He actually gets up from his desk and walks to where she is in the front of the room. It’s almost a stalk, is what it is, and I’m amazed to find I’m experiencing a rush of adrenaline like something really bad is going to happen.
He is approaching her with a definite threatening air.
She does not at all seem, well, impressed.
He is still spouting. He is attempting to throw other people under the bus for leaving the building and smoking. He points at one woman and says, “She! Her! I was not the last person who came into the room! She came back WAAAY after I did!”
“She never left the room.”, says the teacher.
“No. I never left the room.”, says this woman.
“Oh. Sorry ma’am.”, he says, bowing to the woman a little. Bowing? Did he just bow to her in the middle of this breakdown? Why, yes. He did. Funny duck, this guy.
The teacher is being cool. She says he needs to calm down and sit down or he can pick his certificate up in the office of the school in the morning instead of getting it at the end of class.
Now, I don’t even know what relevance the certificate actually has, but this infuriates House-Plate guy. Oh boy. He is over the edge now.
He goes from saying her taking his break is unfair to how she has really made a real mistake now.
I quote, directly from the guy’s mouth, “I have the power! You’ll never teach this class again!”
I have the power? Who are you? He-Man?
Someone says that he is acting like an idiot and he turns his power on them.
“What? What did you say, kid? What?”
There are going to be police here. There’s going to be a fight. I get ready for… er… I don’t know what I was getting ready for, but if it happened, I wasn’t going to be caught not being ready for it.
He grabs his coat and storms out of the room saying, “You will rue the day you ever decided to face off against me, madam! Mark my words!!”
He didn’t actually say that. I wish he had though. That would have been cool.
I realize I’m making this sound kind of silly, but it wasn’t, not really. Although nothing happened, there was a the feeling in the room that violence had just been witnessed or at the very least, barely avoided.
For the rest of the class, the teacher kept looking up every time someone passed the room we were in, as if she expected him to come back in with more barbs, or worse.
He didn’t, though.
There’s no real satisfying end to this story. We finished the class. When I walked out to the parking lot, he wasn’t there waiting or anything. A lot of other people who were in the class sped out of the parking lot and one guy ran a red light.
2750 dollars well spent.
