The days of waiting and worrying about the older girl as she lay ill in intensive care, twice, are also permanently engraved on my memory and stored in my body. I find and feel that concern every time that I get to see her and admire the young woman before me. That it all turned out well in the end was fortunately, but I still feel the toll.

When it came time to pay the ticket, I elected to pay an additional $32 to the City and County of San Francisco and $20 to online provider of traffic school in this jurisdiction. This allows take a course and a test. Once I pass the test, I can have the infraction removed from my driving record, protecting my insurance rates, and presumably rendering me a better, safer driver.

I went through the course materials and took the chapter tests. The content was reasonably well presented, although the web site was annoyingly slow and there were a number of infelicitous UI decisions (arrows that seemed to imply links, but didn’t, no url or other identifying information in the e-mail that they sent me to confirm my registration, etc.)

Some of the material that was presented in the course and the chapter quizzes didn’t seem like it was particularly important to the goal of improving my driving skills and making me a safer, more responsible driver. Material on what constituted valid forms of identification at the DMV is useful, but it isn’t going to keep me from pulling out into traffic when I don’t have the right of way.

Little did I know. After I completed the course, I was directed to take a final exam that was administered by NTSA, the National Traffic Safety Administration, which is not the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA is a branch of the Federal government. NTSA is not:

NTSA provides home study traffic school course review and evaluation to insure compliance with all Court requirements and standards. All home study traffic school course reviews conducted by NTSA for court approval, are conducted by Mr. Ernie Garcia, a retired Highway Patrol Lieutenant with 30 years of experience.

In theory, NTSA is an independent agent that can ensure that the student has taken the course and has learned the material. Each independent provider of traffic school sends their students on to NTSA for final testing.

This final exam is crazy. I thought that my browser had been hijacked, or that I was the subject of a prank. Some of the questions were ridiculous beyond belief.

Examples:

In case you aren’t following me, these three questions pertain not to the Motor Vehicle Code or rules for defensive driving, but to the very specific version of the course materials that I studied. The first refers to a specific illustration in the course materials, the second and third to how the material was presented.

It gets worse.

This test question is asking me about the background color of a particular item?! Unbelievable.

Worse, there is no right answer listed. The background is neither yellow, purple, orange, red, nor blue. It is white, I checked the html.

The background color for that particular paragraph is the same as the preceding one, only the font color is changed to red. Red is not the correct answer.

There are 40 questions on each test. The student must get 20 out of 24 on the questions that pertain to DMV materials and 13 out of the 16 questions that “NTSA develops with each traffic school, security, or course specific questions that relate to specific events in their course that have nothing to do with the required curriculum information of the course.”

Is anyone well served by these questions? The point is to ensure that the person taking the exam is the same as the person who took the course. Or, or from the exam web site, “To reasonably insure that the person taking the traffic school course is the one taking the final examination.” I don’t suppose that you could accurately answer these questions unless you had looked at the course, but I read through the course and I couldn’t remember how many rows of signs there were in a particular illustration or what the first illustration in Chapter 3 was. I have a reasonably good memory for this sort of material, but come on.

Couldn’t the independent traffic schools content be differentiated by content instead of layout? The course materials had various random content, jokes, even a couple of lines about how the school website was created with Dreamweaver. Do they really have to test on formatting?

I was expecting the blood and gore movies of my high school driver’s education classes. This is scarier.

It just reinforces my previous beliefs that traffic school is a scam.

Drive safely.

Name₅₀ – Size of the group required for the given Name to have a 50% chance of being first on an alphabetical listing.

Late₅₀ – Size of the group required for an event having an equal chance of being postponed because of the absence of a single individual.

My name, Baxter, seems to have a surprisingly small Name₅₀ in the typical mostly American circles that I have moved in through my life. Throughout grade school, high school and college, whenever there were more than about 13 or 14 people in the class, I was second alphabetically. The Adamses, Bakers and Ballarons came first.

In the San Francisco white pages my name would appear on page 24 of 456. That means that my name alphabetically proceeds that of 432/456ths or about 95% of the admittedly atypical population of San Francisco.

By calculation, Baxter₅₀ is 1 + ln(0.5) / ln(432/456) or 13.82, a remarkable confirmation of my impressions above so take it with a grain of salt.

Late₅₀ obviously depends on the composition of the group, who it is that is late and what the event is, but it sure does seem like it is often a surprisingly large number. I’ve seen 50 people sitting or standing around waiting for one person who is only peripherally involved in the proceedings. Talk about the difference that one person can make.

I have no idea what either of these metrics could be used for.

Why is it that whenever I hear those words on an automated voicemail system, I react viscerally?

If my call were important to the recipient, there would be a live person saying, “Hello,” and asking me how they could help me. That’s what you do when a call is important. You answer the phone.

Instead the business is saying, “Our money is important to us,” “Your time is not important to us,” or worst, “Our money is more important to us than your time.”

After the long weekend and being away for a while before that, I had a few calls that that I needed to make yesterday. Some of these calls required further calls, so eventually I made to five different businesses. For each call, I had to endure some degree of voicemail, and heard the lying words about how important my call was.

I was primed when I heard the phrase again on the final call. I was already mentally composing the blog post that went along the above lines.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. This particular vendor had concocted a new trick for managing their voicemail queue. Instead of giving me the chance to either hold for the “next available operator” or leave a voice mail message for callback, they implemented a completely annoying system where they 1) kept me on hold for five minutes, 2) at the end of five minutes they told me that I had been waiting for five minutes and if no one had answered my call after an additional five minutes, I would be able to 3) leave a voicemail message and 4) they would return my call when they could.

Talk about annoying. I had to wait 10 minutes, on actual direct dial, working hours, long distance, just to leave a voice mail.

Why do I think that neither my call, my time, nor my money are actually that important to them?

[Update: September 6, 2007, 8:36pm] So the vendor calls me back and gets my voice mail (immediately.) What do they say, “We are sorry we missed you. Please try calling again.” So I call again. I wait another 10 minutes, to leave another message.

Can I get an “Arggggggh!”

I may be replacing the jimi with this paper wallet. I made one in about five minutes and a second one in two minutes. Lighter and thinner than the jimi, plus it carries the same contents.

The bonus is that it is made out of a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper. I’m fantasizing about all the things that I could print on that paper and what else I could stop carrying. Notebook – check, important phone numbers – check, emergency contact info – check, family photos – check.

Update – April 27 – After carrying one for a few days, I’m still happy with it, but I did make one mistake. I thought that since it was wallet-like, I could revert to my old pre-jimi days of carrying all my cash inside the wallet. It doesn’t really work. The wallet isn’t big enough to attempt to sort through the bills inside. It doesn’t open wide enough to discriminate between bills. Just carry large bills in the wallet and everything else loose in the pocket. When you need a large bill, slip it out.