My Driving Lesson: Part 5

This will be the last entry for this episodic content. If you're interested to follow my story from the very first day, use the keyword "jpj" to look for these kinds of posts. Now, on the the post.

Again, I had to skip class for the second time this week in order to attend the test. I've submitted my special leave letter to the respective lecturers but aside from attendance, I'm also missing out on my studies. No choice. I went home on the Tuesday afternoon, but stopped by Nilai for a while to take care of some business. After all that's done, I head home using the "oh-so-efficient-and-always-arrive-on-time" KTM Komuter. I unintentionally slept in the train while sitting in a vacant train coach. Probably I was too tired from the usual headache and an uncounted for flu. Woke up a station before Kajang (UKM). I didn't remember when I doze off though. Fetched by my mom. Settled everything there is to settle, grabbed a comic, read it in my room and went to sleep.

On the Wednesday of my test, I woke up 5 minutes late. But I still took my time knowing that today is going to be a very long day with a lot of waiting. Ate breakfast and went to the centre. There was a large number of crowd there which means only 1 thing; longer wait times. So there was 3 colours (each representing a group). White for repeats, yellow and green for first timers, with the only difference is yellow is limited to 60 person. The green bunch that day was 122 person. That sucks. I hate waiting. There's a Malay saying that goes,"waiting is a torture" in which I agree wholeheartedly.

My first test was part 2, which are the hills, parks and turns. I was kinda nervous for the hill as out of all the 3 things, hills were where I failed the most. My wait wasn't very long for this. Got a car with a damaged gearbox since it produces this weird shifting sound no matter how hard I press on the clutch. And the gears itself wobble at its place. Meh. What can I do anyway. With the holy "Bismillah" coming out of my mouth, I stepped on the clutch, changed to the 1st gear and lowered the handbrakes... slowly, I lift my left foot from the clutch... the car moves and by the time the car was stable enough, I tip toed the accelerator, the car moves up the hill, my heart pulsate faster, by the time before the sidemirror is alligned with the poles, I hit the brakes, leaned outside the window to see the front wheels are perfectly in the yellow area. 1 thing is done. Now to the difficult part. After raising my hand to indicate to the JPJ Instructor that I'm done there, I repeat the process of moving, and the car moved forward without a little reversing. Thank God!! Passed the difficult part. Now the rest should be a cakewalk. Did the other 2 things well. Haha that's a little dramatic story-telling from me.


Now on to the part 3, on road. All of the peeps from group yellow and green were waiting for their turn around if I'm not mistaken 8 cars. That is 60 yellow + 122 green = 182 peeps with average of 10 minutes each = 182 peeps x 10 minutes = 1820 minutes required divided with 8 cars so 1820/8 = 227.5 minutes + around 30 minutes of the JPJ officers lunch break which now brings us to a total of approximately 257.5 minutes which is roughly 4.3 hours of maximum waiting time for your turn. And this isn't Alaska people, Malaysia is a tropical country that is very generous (sometimes too generous) with their sunshines. I was one of the last dozen people. Which sucks. I doze off multiple times because I was so freaking tired and bored of waiting. If only I had a PSP at that moment. Not to mention also thirsty, but because I'm afraid that my number is called when I went to the canteen to get a drink, I didn't buy anything. The numbers were called out randomly too. If it was called in some sort of order, at least I can do a little bit of timing to do something else to kill my boredom. So when there was very few people left there, finally my number was called out, but I still have to wait for the instructor to test another guy first.


I had Jalan 1 for my test, which is the one going near the school. Aside from a few law breaking citizens of Malaysia, there wasn't a problem. When I got back to the centre, guess what? More waiting! Yay!! If I subtract all of the waiting that I have to do, I think it'll take up no more than half an hour. So right now I had to wait for my blue card from the instructor who hasn't gave it to the person in charge of redistributing all of the cards to be kept by the driving school branch because he doesn't like to come out of his car very much so he keep a number of them before giving it back. Which made me unnecessarily wait. What an uneffective protocol.

Whatever it is, I passed them all. I got my license. My real P license I will receive this Saturday so I would only be driving by then. Which I thinki I would. Anybody want to volunteer? Hehe.