Friday, September 15, 2017

Driver Test Prep

I know this is old news but I just want to re-iterate how proud we are of A passing her driving test in a stick-shift car. I felt terribly guilty making her take the test in a manual, but she had no qualms about it. Truth be told she's been driving a stick from day one, and she's comfortable and confident in it, but even still, taking the test is another thing altogether.

And, getting our acts together for her to take the test was not without it's own set of drama. Kind of like everything in our lives. The problems we faced were that both of our cars had slight issues that were not a big deal in the actual performance or safety of the vehicles, but were going to be an issue for sticklers who do everything by the book. I can't say I blame them, and rules are rules. For full disclosure I didn't know for a fact that these issues would be a problem, I just assumed they would based on what I'd heard from other people.

The first issue was with mom's car, which has a crack in the windshield. Total bummer, but not anybody's fault. It happened when she was on the highway and a truck flung a rock at her. It hit her window leaving a crack that was about a foot long. The window is perfectly intact, though we are pretty sure that it won't pass inspection. It is going to cost a few hundred dollars to fix, so we decided to sit on it until inspection time, at which point we'll replace it. We assumed that the DMV wouldn't allow A to take her driving test with said windshield, which left my car.

Now my car, of course, had a minor issue, as well. Modern cars have these crazy tire pressure sensors, which make sense, except that (at least on my car) they seem to break down. I've replace three so far, and for good measure the fourth one finally bit the dust. What happens is when the sensor dies the entire pressure sensing system dies and an indicator light comes on. Technically it's not the end of the world because you can just check the pressure regularly without the sensors. The problem is that the indicator light on the dash will raise red flags, and it won't pass inspection, which I assumed meant it wouldn't be allowed for her test. The reality is, did we want to take the chance of driving all the way over there only to find out we couldn't use that car?

These revelations really came to light a day before her driving test, so I had to scramble to fix the situation. I actually had a new sensor still in the package that I had sitting around. As I mentioned three of them had gone down, so I had one on the ready, and it's a good thing I did. It was late afternoon so we were pushing our luck, but I called our friends at Tip Top Tire and they said they could fit us in. I hurried over there, they put the new sensor in, and lo and behold, we were good to go.

I'm not a big fan of last minute drama before a big event, but we managed to weather this storm. And A passed her test, despite the slew of setbacks that threatened her driving independence. Kudos to her for that. Now she's a driver, and me and mom have a whole new set of things to worry about, but for now we're just happy that she passed.

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Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Muhammad Rehan for the pic.

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