A Hard Lesson in Overconfidence and Bad Advice

Image by author using Canva AI

I was 19 when I finally got around to getting my driving license. I’d got my learner’s permit 3 years earlier, and my boyfriend (who had become my husband by the time of the event in question) had been only too happy to teach me how to drive.

It hadn’t occurred to me to take driving lessons. Back then, it wasn’t really a thing. At least, not with anyone I knew. All my friends were taught by boyfriends, or their dads. But official lessons? Nope.

I mean, heck, when I was 16, my boyfriend was 21. He’d been driving for eons. He was an actual grown-up who had driven on highways for hundreds of miles and everything! Of course he’d be a great teacher. Right?

Wrong.

On exam day, my dad picked me up and off we went (my boyfriend-turned-husband was working). Convinced that I would ace the test, I admit I was probably a tad smug as I grinned at the examiner in the back seat. I started the car and followed the his instructions, drive here, go there, turn left and so on. After all, I’d been driving for 3 years on my learner’s permit; I was no newbie!

Smiling ear to ear and eager to see my actual driving license in my hot little hands, I drove as confidently as I always did, sailing through uncontrolled intersections without so much as slowing down or even glancing sideways to see if any cars were coming, just the way I’d been taught. None of this Nervous Nellie girl stuff for me!

Imagine my shock when … gasp! I failed! Apparently, the examiner didn’t agree with my husband’s methods. Certain that I’d been marked unfairly, I was sure the examiner was a moron. Or at least that maybe they had different rules in the province where my husband had grown up and learned how to drive. Surely he couldn’t have got it so wrong!

Well … turns out he did. And aside from zooming through those intersections without checking for crossing traffic, he’d shared a couple of other bad driving habits with me, too.

It’s always amazed me that the examiner didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke or something while having the misfortune of being my back-seat hostage. He must have been white-knuckling it the whole time, certain he wouldn’t make it out alive.

But he did, and after he told me the things I’d got wrong, he said I could try again in a week and left the car.

Furious at this idiot for having been unfair or wrong or just plain stupid, I ranted and raved all the way home. My poor dad sat in silence. To his credit, if he’d said anything at all it would have made it worse. Smart man, he was.

Seems it’s a good idea to take driving lessons from a qualified instructor so you don’t pass along your bad habits or your sloppy ones or your just-plain-didn’t-know-about-that mistakes. Thanks to the professional advice I’d received from the examiner after my epic fail, I passed the test the following week, achieving a perfect score.

Over the years since then, that lesson has lingered. There have been numerous times when I was faced with the option of taking advice or instruction from people who claimed to know what they were doing, or that they were experts, but unless they could show me sufficient evidence in support of those claims, I wasn’t interested.

There were also many occasions when I would later hear of people who regretted signing up for those workshops or courses or whatever it was because the self-proclaimed “experts” weren’t so “expert” after all.