Friday the 13th of August was the day I passed my driving test, graduated from Comfort Driving Centre and bought my overpriced P-plate (those people at the 3M company really know how to capitalise on the unthinking state which the euphoria of getting that much-coveted license in Singapore brings about).
I can legally drive now – 6 months after getting into a driver’s seat for the first time and after one unsuccessful and traumatising test a month ago that reduced me to tears.
My first tester chastised me so severely that I felt as though I had been brought back to the days in my SAP primary school and getting a good admonishment from my Chinese teacher or the Chinese-speaking discipline master. With all seriousness and graveness of death, Foo Shou Way slowly passed his judgement, “Tsk tsk tsk, you’re a VERY dangerous driver,” slowly pronouncing each word clearly to make sure it sunk right to the back of my youthful and seemingly reckless face, into my head.
Then I went to the toilet and cried. It was only a test that some people I am aware of attempted more than 10 times. Yet, I could not help myself. Things were looking awful for me then too, with me failing everything I put myself into (screwing up my A Levels, not being able to get into a local university, having failed both my basic and final theory once each and being a wreck teaching Sunday school). But I had to stop myself from crying in the cubicle because I desperately needed to pee too and I had run out of tissue. My last bit of unsoiled tissue went to my face again when I emerged from the toilet and caught my red face in the mirror. So that meant that I could neither cry nor pee anymore. And that had made me want to cry more.
Anyway, back to Friday the 13th.
Friday the 13th’s tester was a precious Malay. There are only two Malay testers at the centre, and it is pretty well-known that the Malay testers are the nice ones. He was dozing off as I took my test. He took me on a heavily modified and very shortened Route 3. I was probably the first to finish my test. In spite of my temporal loss of time awareness during the tense procedure, I believe I was barely on the road for six minutes.
I thanked him excessively when he told me with a deadpan face, “OK, you passed your test.” At that point, I was simply thankful that I did not have to wait with uncertainty and plan for another test date at least a month from now; in a month’s time, I would have already been posted to a school and would have great difficulty trying to get time out to take do the retest. The gratitude was probably also a misrepresentation of the elation of simply passing the test.
Upon reflection, I truly had something to be thankful for. Mr Malay had not just closed two eyes to my mistakes; he had been both forgiving (probably taking into account the malfunctioning of my psychomotor skills under test conditions, and accepting that as a young driver, I am bound to make seemingly-unforgivable-by-the-Traffic-Police’s-standard mistakes which I will correct in due time if given the opportunity to practise) and accommodating (by appearing, whether deliberately by his kind nature or as a result of a heavy lunch on his alertness at 2PM, groggily unaware, as well as not updating his score sheet as I drive). The previous tester had furiously begun marking his score sheet as soon as I inched my car out of the parking lot to begin the test.
(I have bolded the two key words as I am fully aware that my long parentheses and multiple-conjunctions sentence structure tend to leave my readers, and myself included, lost in the original sentence.) (Do my entries make a very tiring read?)
Since then, I have driven to tuition in Tampines, to church and back home. I have also almost got into a nasty accident involving a taxi (it’s always the taxi), almost mounted the kerb in the middle of a straight stretch of road and driven my mother halfway to a state of hypertension since.
I can legally drive now – 6 months after getting into a driver’s seat for the first time and after one unsuccessful and traumatising test a month ago that reduced me to tears.
My first tester chastised me so severely that I felt as though I had been brought back to the days in my SAP primary school and getting a good admonishment from my Chinese teacher or the Chinese-speaking discipline master. With all seriousness and graveness of death, Foo Shou Way slowly passed his judgement, “Tsk tsk tsk, you’re a VERY dangerous driver,” slowly pronouncing each word clearly to make sure it sunk right to the back of my youthful and seemingly reckless face, into my head.
Then I went to the toilet and cried. It was only a test that some people I am aware of attempted more than 10 times. Yet, I could not help myself. Things were looking awful for me then too, with me failing everything I put myself into (screwing up my A Levels, not being able to get into a local university, having failed both my basic and final theory once each and being a wreck teaching Sunday school). But I had to stop myself from crying in the cubicle because I desperately needed to pee too and I had run out of tissue. My last bit of unsoiled tissue went to my face again when I emerged from the toilet and caught my red face in the mirror. So that meant that I could neither cry nor pee anymore. And that had made me want to cry more.
Anyway, back to Friday the 13th.
Friday the 13th’s tester was a precious Malay. There are only two Malay testers at the centre, and it is pretty well-known that the Malay testers are the nice ones. He was dozing off as I took my test. He took me on a heavily modified and very shortened Route 3. I was probably the first to finish my test. In spite of my temporal loss of time awareness during the tense procedure, I believe I was barely on the road for six minutes.
I thanked him excessively when he told me with a deadpan face, “OK, you passed your test.” At that point, I was simply thankful that I did not have to wait with uncertainty and plan for another test date at least a month from now; in a month’s time, I would have already been posted to a school and would have great difficulty trying to get time out to take do the retest. The gratitude was probably also a misrepresentation of the elation of simply passing the test.
Upon reflection, I truly had something to be thankful for. Mr Malay had not just closed two eyes to my mistakes; he had been both forgiving (probably taking into account the malfunctioning of my psychomotor skills under test conditions, and accepting that as a young driver, I am bound to make seemingly-unforgivable-by-the-Traffic-Police’s-standard mistakes which I will correct in due time if given the opportunity to practise) and accommodating (by appearing, whether deliberately by his kind nature or as a result of a heavy lunch on his alertness at 2PM, groggily unaware, as well as not updating his score sheet as I drive). The previous tester had furiously begun marking his score sheet as soon as I inched my car out of the parking lot to begin the test.
(I have bolded the two key words as I am fully aware that my long parentheses and multiple-conjunctions sentence structure tend to leave my readers, and myself included, lost in the original sentence.) (Do my entries make a very tiring read?)
Since then, I have driven to tuition in Tampines, to church and back home. I have also almost got into a nasty accident involving a taxi (it’s always the taxi), almost mounted the kerb in the middle of a straight stretch of road and driven my mother halfway to a state of hypertension since.
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