License To Ill

When our daughter was first learning to drive a few years ago, we asked friends and neighbors for recommendations for behind-the-wheel training - and the same name kept popping up. To protect the instructor's identity, I will refer to him as "Steve" and his driving school as the "Hello" driving school. And feedback we received about Hello Steve were not so much recommendations as resigned, "well, everyone seems to use him, he has availability, and his pass rate is extremely high" comments.

As we are big proponents of mediocre-to-fair instruction for the next generation of drivers, we enrolled our daughter with Hello.

A couple of weeks later, Hello Steve appeared in our driveway, looking like an aging hippie with his long, gray hair and faded Hawaiian shirt. Our daughter hopped in the car with a few of her contemporaries and off they drove. It turns out their instruction from Steve consisted less of driving rules and more of him sharing rumors and gossip about other students who had previously enrolled in his school. Our daughter noted that every time he drove into a neighborhood and they passed a house of someone Steve had instructed and assumed the students might know, he'd dive into the salacious details the student had naively confided in him. 

Something else she learned during her second lesson was that if they provided Hello Steve with Crumbl cookies or other treats, they would receive higher scores on their skills assessments. 

They may not have learned the finer points of parallel parking, but the teen drivers were certainly getting many life lessons under Hello Steve's tutelage.

Probably the most puzzling Hello Steve story occurred toward the end of our daughter's instruction. He began the lesson that day by requesting our daughter drive to the grocery store four miles away so he could retrieve the shoe (singular) he had left in the store's parking lot. He asked this nonchalantly, as though things like this happen often...and to everyone.

She obliged, they found and retrieved the shoe, and later that day, Hello Steve gave her a passing grade in the behind the wheel class.

Avoid Oakton roads,

Brutalism

A completely unrelated driving school photo.