Six years ago, I thought that I would have my first crack at becoming a wagon driver. So, with me being young and naive, laid down about £1500 to a well-known Teesside-based training school, without taking an assessment drive at first to see what the instructor was like.
And so, on the first day of my course, the instructor showed me and another lad the motor that we would be taking our training in, a 53-plate MAN with an 8-speed slap-over 'box. He then mentioned that we should have mastered the gearbox within a day or two of training. We then drove the wagon across to the Riverside Stadium and back to the yard a few times so we could get used to it. So far, so good.
However, when we got to the Darlo bypass, things began to go downhill REALLY fast from then on. As I approached the “Reg Vardy” roundabout (where the A66 meets the A167) he said to take the third exit towards the A1. But, somehow, I must have misheard him and took the second exit towards Northallerton instead. He went ballistic, screaming “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! WHERE ARE YOU [ZB]ING GOING!?!!” We then had to drive through Hurworth and head back to the bypass via a road that was barely wide enough for our 18-tonner. I was really struggling with working the gearbox, especially when “crossing the gate”. He kept shouting “STOP FIGHTING WITH IT!!” each time I tried to change range, his face PURPLE with rage!
At the end of the second day, I was so stressed out with this nutter that I just packed the course in altogether. There was no way that I was going to be ready for my test on the fifth day. In them two days, we did NO reversing practice whatsoever.
Here’s a link to a video of a bloke with a similar personality to my first instructor:
Fast-forward five years, I thought that I would have another go at doing my Cat C. But this time, my second instructor was the polar opposite to the one I had before. We had some really good craic with him, and laughing so hard at his jokes, I thought sooner or later that I was going to crash since I was crying with laughter! I passed first time with him.
Anybody else had a similar experience?