Agonotheta

Traffic School (Reloaded)

November 10, 2004

It turns out traffic school wasn't all that bad. The first thing the instructor said when he walked in was, "How about we leave early tonight?" To which the crowd replied with uproarious applause. For the first half all he did was go around to each person in the room and find out what infraction they had infracted to deserve traffic school.

Then he showed several scenarios on one of those magnetic street boards. You know, the ones that have those little matchbox cars with magnets on them that you can put in any position. He did about 10 scenarios where we all had to write down who we thought deserved the ticket. Then he gave us the answers.

The last (and longest) part, was the question and answer section. This is probably pretty self-explanatory, so I'm not going to go into it. But I will say that this section got pretty out-of-hand. My fellow students used this opportunity to bitch about why they got their respective ticket. Also, the mandatory, "Well, I heard that in Arizona you can make a left turn from the right lane." And, "In California, motorcycles can drive between lanes in traffic. Why can't they in Utah?"

Overall it wasn't that bad. The instructor was pretty entertaining. He's a retired police officer who used to teach cops the traffic laws. He has done traffic school for Salt Lake City for thirty-someodd years and has several canned jokes that were actually pretty funny. I've been to traffic school before where it was two hours of boring instructor piled on top of the stinking refuse that is our traffic laws. But this one was just the opposite. It was the same stinking refuse, but presented with icing on top and a garnish or two on the side.

So, overall, if you have the chance to go to Salt Lake City Traffic School, go for it! I'm going to give it a ranking of three out of five Loritabs, because after all, it is still traffic school.