My desire is to be safe and live a long enjoyable life. One of the biggest risks to that is driving an automobile. Yeah, I have a VW GTI so I enjoy driving and the car (or is it me) likes to perform.
I was exceeding a posted (speed trap) 35 mph speed limit awhile back. I was cited for 50 MPH while approaching and entering a State Highway on which traffic was moving at 60-70 MPH. The city cop pulled me over on the shoulder of the blend lane out on the highway… yeah, really.
So as a good citizen, I decided to take one of those computer on line (Texas) six hour safety courses and avoid two points on my record. There has to be a choice of at least 50 vendors. A lot of them advertise “Comedy” driving courses. They must tell jokes in the 10 “required” 6 minute break periods. I picked a (pun intended) middle-of-the-road, vendor called “Click-it-Away” Texas Defensive Driving School. Their break periods I discover, are simply a link to go look at CarFax.com website for six minutes while watching a countdown clock, yeah, really. Maybe I missed the humor in that… $25 for a hour of jokes may have been better…
The course was clearly aimed 50% at teenage to 30 year old drivers who have the worse driving records. It has been a long time since I last had a defensive driving course. One I remember when I was a teenager was the Ohio State Highway Patrol video of real car crashes with real blood and gore. (Not Al.) Maybe they showed it in High School. Not much has changed. Luckily the “scare-em-straight” video is only a single segment of the training.
The rest of the time there was some good information and I think overall, except for the forced 6 hour time limit (California only requires 4 hours), a defensive driving refresher is a good thing. It could be done shorter and probably as a full video like the TV reporting specials. The problem is the small training course vendors do not or will not spend the money to produce such a video, especially state specific. None of the video in this training was done in house.
Some sections were “dubbed” with female voice updates. Only once or twice did I notice rather small inaccuracies to fact, more like obvious typo errors.
I work with a program called Adobe Authorware and I swear this training was done with that off the shelf training program software or today’s equivalent. That’s not a negative, just a comment that there is not a high hurdle to jump to produce training materials on low budget these days. The Authorware training system is quite powerful.
There is one thing that occurred that I DID NOT LIKE.
To make sure you are who you claim to be, there are “Proctor” questions that pop up unexpectedly. They have a 90 second time limit. They use personal information taken from the auto tag registration information that the examinee should know offhand. They are fill-in-the-blank and not multiple choices. I knew all the answers except…
One question asked the brand of automobile to which my license plate was registered. Hmmm… 90 seconds to decide VW or Volkswagen. I entered VW. TILT! TILT! WRONG! STOP! KILL! DIE! The program explodes, locks up and kicks out of gear.
Geeze, I’m thinking a one try failure and five hours work down the drain! The message says call a 1-800 type number to get “re-instated”, you can’t do it on line.
It’s 9:00 PM Sunday. I call the number. IT’S NOT A 24 HOUR SERVICE! I missed the office open time by 10 seconds. (10:00 PM Eastern). Quite a few old Navy words floated, um… maybe exploded from my mouth.
Next evening I immediately get a real person, no waiting, a very helpful young lady is on line. I prove who I am and she looks at the question. I tell her I entered VW and it probably wants Volkswagen. She says, “No, not exactly…”
She explains she is not “allowed” to tell me the answer and she becomes completely flustered on what to do next. My answer is correct but is not what the “computer” wants. I say, “Huh?” “Yeah, a shorter version,” she hints. We work with hints for about two or three minutes. I say, “Shorter is VW, but that’s wrong.”
She goes away to consult with her supervisor for a few minutes. When she returns we negotiate the correct answer is “VOLK”. I’m thinking… “I would never ever pick that as a first choice or any choice in a fill-in-the-blank answer about what car I drive.” Some registrar may have put that on the registration but it is not in the front of MY mind.
The program might have accepted the first four letters of Volkswagen if it was programmed correctly. (I’ll never know.) But it should include a special case exception to include VW. A one shot 90 second write-in is not a good human interface for computer proctoring…
I give the training material a C+, for good, informative, middle-of-the-road production but the proctoring experience a D- for the limited hours support, the one shot do-or-die questions and the inflexible human response interface for the correct answer. Human customer service when available is B+. “Young lady, you did alright.”
Ahhh!… just another interesting story to tell and glad it is over. Oh, yes… I passed with flying colors… 🙂