Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Sprinting the Last Mile to Reach Test Mode

  
On the Sunday preceding my scheduled Friday exam, I vowed that I'd get to my second taxi-school class the following day, whether or not insomnia kept me awake the night before.  I'd just get there and drag myself through the day, whatever it took.

Coffees must have helped.  At one point that afternoon I found myself the only student in the room who wasn't dozing, whether slumped over in some distorted position, eyes shut, or with their head cradled on their desk and out to the world.  It was the class on driver-passenger relations and everyone already knew the TLC exam wouldn't include much on the subject, so most of those present concentrated their efforts on just putting in a day.  The teacher, an older guy who still did a few days behind the wheel each week, tried patience, but suddenly he stopped talking, looked round the room in exasperation and, turning in my direction, said, "It's just you and me here right now."  He ended his sentence on a raised voice, and a few of the students stirred and tried to rouse themselves, but with only two hours to go in the class day, it was the clock that spoke loudest.
I got home exhausted, which helped me get to sleep a little earlier that night and push myself to a second consecutive day of class on Tuesday.  This would be my third and final class, on geography.  It was taught by Klee Walsh, who'd also led the class I took on TLC rules and regulations.  Klee, an occasional taxi driver in his thirties, liked teaching and was sharp at it, helping the time flow more easily for the rest of us.  (Surprising me, all the LaGuardia taxi-school teachers showed a high level of professionalism.  I must have assumed, like the average Joe on the street, that, well, there'd just be some tired, dumb cab drivers running the class.)
During that day's lunch break, I hurried a few blocks away and managed to do my drug test, for the police files.
I had showed up at the taxi school thinking that, with seven years' driving experience under my belt, I essentially knew it all.  But I was pleasantly stunned by how much I had learned, and how valuable it was to have learned it.  I'd forgotten quite a bit, and things had changed.  There had always been a lot of traffic rules -- not a few of which seemed unnecessarily burdensome and exposed drivers to getting fines they thought undeserved -- but by 2012 there were a whole lot more.  ("Today's cab driver has to be more circumspect -- it's a different world," I remember Jeff, the defensive-driving instructor, telling me.)
I hoped to use parts of Wednesday and Thursday to study for the exam, but I first had to run back up to the MVD office on 34th Street.  More than two months earlier they had given me my new, temporary license, but the permanent version was to have come in the mail a few weeks later and I still hadn't received it. 
There was a long waiting line at the License X-Press office.  Eventually, they were able to tell me that my license hadn't been delivered because the mailing didn't have my apartment number on it. So an employee there added that detail to my file (which had somehow been deleted from my earlier records), and requested a redelivery.
The envelope had initially been mailed with my full name and street address (excepting my apartment number), and my name and apartment number were posted at both the entrance to my building and on my individual mail box, but my postal carrier of zip code station 10014 had refused to slip it into my box and instead returned it to the MVD headquarters in Albany, complaining about a lack of delivery information.  When I told a postal employee at another post office what had happened, she said, "And they wonder why we're going out of business!"
I didn't study all that hard for the exam, but I did make a point of reviewing the major roads and routes, the water crossings, the traffic restrictions dealing with priority bus lanes and prohibited turns on "thru streets," and, because there were so many new hotels, I tried to memorize their locations, as best I could.
The more I studied, the more I saw how much more there was to know.  I'd already invested about $550 toward getting the new hack license and I couldn't afford to blow it.  I tried to relax and not worry too much about the following day's exam but I knew there were no guarantees against getting a string of tricky questions and coming up short on the minimum 70 score I needed.

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