Pre-Test

I had a four-hour yard session prior to my driving test at 1:30. I learned some things during this session that I wished I had learned before the day of my test.

The yard session started with me demonstrating to the other students how to conduct the Pre-Trip Inspection and Air Brake Test. No issues there.

Most of the yard had gotten paved the day before, but today it was being striped. So we were once again in the back of the lot with all the ruts and holes on the temporary parallel parking course. And that was all there was room for. There was not enough room behind this course to back the truck up. So I was unable to practice the other two maneuvers I was going to be tested on—the Forward Stop and the Straight Line Backing. But those maneuvers are easy, right? So no big deal, I guess.

Then I demonstrated for the other students how to do the parallel parking—or how not to do it, since I messed it up. I tried a couple more times and eventually got the truck in the box. Then the instructor said he would demonstrate how to do it. Not a big confidence builder on test day. But he did a good job explaining how to do it. He stopped several times throughout the process to explain the angle of the truck and showed us what we should see in the mirrors. A lot of this I had figured out on my own by just doing it. But this level of explanation would have been helpful a couple of weeks ago.

So I continued to practice parallel parking. At one point I got myself into a jam. It’s a jam I often find myself in. Where when I reach the halfway mark of the maneuver—where I swing the cab of the truck around and the course cones come into view and I can finally see my position, good or bad. Bad is when I’m too close to the third cone. Or worse when I can’t see the third cone at all. And this is where I found myself. I usually just admit defeat and start over. But this time the instructor was there. He said, “This is great! You got yourself into a jam and now I can show you how to fix it.” The fix wasn’t hard. It was just repeating the first half of the maneuver until the third cone is where I want it. Ingenious! All this time I thought there was no way out and was praying I wouldn’t get jammed up during my test. But today was test day. This information on how to get myself out of a jam would have been helpful weeks ago. I would have had more time to practice it. But time had ran out.

I spent the last hour driving. The instructor and I drove to the truck stop and back. He bought me a coffee. I really enjoy driving.

When we got back to the yard, I met up with the guy in charge of the program. He was busy painting the lines on the newly paved lot. I had some questions regarding the testing rules—like when I was to put the air brakes on and blow my horn. He went to his office and fetched a form that laid out all the maneuvers I was to perform and their associated rules. Turns out instead of 3 maneuvers there were 4! At the end of the Straight Line Backing, I drive out of the box and set up for parallel parking. Well this pulling out and setting up is a maneuver called Forward Offset Tracking. This was not something I had been practicing as a separate maneuver. And actually I struggle sometimes setting up for the parallel parking. Again, something I wish I had known before now. And now, I was literally out of time. It was time to drive to the testing site.