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Previous Challenge Entry
Topic: Exams (07/26/04)
TITLE: Death of An Orange Cone
By Autumn Conley
07/29/04
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I am convinced that while some words were derived with completely harmless intentions, they have come into our language with a stigma that they cannot overcome. One of these words is “examination.” If you take a moment to ponder all the days of your life and every instance in which this word mingled with you, you will find it to be a menacing word indeed. Examinations in school meant trying to stuff a semester’s worth of notes into a five-minute cram session. Examinations at the doctor’s office meant looking for something that you hoped they wouldn’t find. But, for me, despite the panic attacks induced by school exams and doctor’s exams, the driver’s license examination proved to be a traumatic event that I thought I would certainly never overcome.

I am now 33, so I find it odd that I can still remember being 17 and sitting in that boring after-school driver’s ed class watching films about people dying in car accidents and reading literature about why you should always look both ways at least twenty-three times before you pull out onto another street. And, as boring as it was, the classroom part of driver’s ed was at least tolerable. The hands-on practice, however was a terrifying experience for me. To this day, I can visibly remember murdering several cases of orange cones. It wasn’t intentional – I just didn’t seem to have the hand-eye coordination with the car that I had used to master my old Atari 2600 games at the time. While most of my classmates were thrilled with the new freedom of driving, I found it to be the most terrifying thing I could have faced. It seemed to me that driving was second only to being placed on a firing line, or being forced to read my private poetry to an audience of all of the boys in my junior class. To this day, I hold a grudge against the Chevrolet Corsica – especially those burgundy color ones like they forced us to maneuver around those blasted cones.

Needless to say, the driving test was practically an insurmountable task. I failed it four times – yes, four. Even in my little 1979 Sunbird that was only about as big as a shoebox, I couldn’t seem to find room amongst those cones to parallel park. Eventually, I got my license (thank goodness, because I work twelve miles from my house). It was strange the day I actually passed the test (barely) that several of the State officers in the BMV sighed in relief all in unison. I believe I even heard one of them clapping. (Of course, the three who had suffered heart attacks and aneurisms while driving with me were not there.) I scored pretty well on the ACTs, and I didn’t do too awful reading the eye charts at the optometrist last year, but my driver’s license was the toughest passing mark I ever earned…and believe it or not, to this day, I’ve never had so much as a speeding ticket – unless you count that running my Sentra under a truck incident…well, uh…nevermind.