The scary AARP senior drivers classes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I work in an education center, and we allow AARP to run one of their classes in our space. It is a “Senior Driver Refresher” class. It’s all classroom, nothing behind the wheel, and people call my office to sign up for it.

I get some of those calls, and some of these folks are downright scary. A substantial number of them have trouble with or are totally unable to understand directions to find the class, and I’m talking about the route from our parking ramp to our classrooms. They pretty much all know how to find our building and our parking ramp. They’re old people and we are a hospital and medical building complex. It’s once they park–

The directions I give are, “When you’re parked, take the ramp elevator down to the loby level and turn left as soon as you enter the building. We are the first office you will find.” I can elaborate on that with more details if people insist, but with some folks addig detail is just adding confusion.

Sometimes you don’t need formal training to recognize when someone shouldn’t be out driving any more. But all I can do about it is give a heads up to the instructor if there were several calls like that – like saying “I think you’re going to have an extra tough crowd today.”

It’s actually a pretty interesting course in its intent, which is two-fold. The first is a refresher in changes to traffic laws, signs, etc. The second is much more valuable, IMO. The instructor presents a reasonably objective set of criteria to help the students self-assess whether they should stay behind the wheel or give up driving.

Sometimes middle aged “kids” sign up their parents to try to convince the oldsters to stop driving. Or the older folks sign up to prove they can still handle it. So there’s often a lot of family stress around this, and both generations feel better about proving their point through a neutral arbiter.

At the same time, there is no unavoidable downside to taking it. Taking the class gives them a smidge off their car insurance, nobody has recorded any kind of “score” that could be used against them, and the old folks are perfectly free to ignore evidence of the class, lie to their kids, and continue driving.

But I am reasonably ssure that some of the more dangerous drivers may have pulled themselves off the street, given how many of them walk out with some level of emotionl distress. However, I can’t recall anyone ever giving up on the spot, and asking us to call a cab or a ride.

2

Boyo Jim says, “When you’re parked, take the ramp elevator down to the loby level and turn left as soon as you enter the building. We are the first office you will find.”

I know what an express way or highway ramp is. I know what a ramp in a parking garage is, but I do not know what a RAMP elevator is. I would be looking for an steep escalator or some such as the only way into an under ground bunker with only that sentence for directions. I know what multi level parking garages are and that they sometimes have elevators but if I had had never been there before, I would be asking for better directions because I might have to park someplace other than than that strange ramp that has elevators or come in another door of the place if it has one, There are just a lot of things that make those kinds of directions not adequate.

YMMV

3

Sorry… they are in a parking ramp, which is what we call multi-story garages around here. There is only one elevator to take, so whatever elevator they found would be the right one.

4

I know plenty of people like that. I don’t get it either. These are otherwise intelligent people, but they CANNOT drive anywhere outside of their normal routine. Hell, I can find any street in LA-sized Sydney’s greater metropolitan region because that’s what street directories are freakin’ for.

So, a COW-ORKER gives me a ride to the station each night. It’s on her way, and there’s no drama. But sometimes, she needs to go to a relative’s house in the opposite direction. I still go with her because she can drop me at another station on the same line. But when we do this (about a dozen times this year), she cannot get there without my help (bearing in mind the first time I’d never been there either, and was as clueless as her - but I simply looked it up.

Here are the directions:

“At the traffic lights, where you turn right every night, turn left instead. Turn right at the next lights. Turn left at the ones after that. Go to the end of that street and turn right (left, right, left, right, couldn’t be easier). Go to the top of the hill and turn right. Take the first left, and that’s the street. Just look for the number.”

Those are directions I could expect somebody to get wrong the first time, likely get wrong the second (maybe), and possibly just get wrong a third. But after a dozen times, I’m at a loss as to how to help her.

5

There are some people who should be legally mandated to carry a GPS navigator. :smiley:

6

I just naturally shoot anyone who tries to give directions with ‘left’ & ‘right’.

One mistake and you are toast.

If Cardinal directions are used, then you can reason out what went wrong or if the directions are actually wrong. ( of course people NEVER give wrong directions )

Good directions go something like this IMO:

The xyz place is South of here about 2 miles.
Go West down this street you are on which is straight ahead and turn South, ‘left’ at the third light which is ‘Cross’ Street and go for 10 blocks ( three lights ) and turn West ( right ) on ‘Hill’ street for about ½ mile to ‘Elm’ street which has a large pink house on the S/W corner and turn South once again ( left) and you will see xyz on your left, the East side of the street in one block. xyz is on the East side of ‘Elm’ street South of ‘Hill’ street.

Now, even if they make a mistake in turning, they can still get there because they know which direction to head and can find it coming from the opposite direction.

YMMV

*::: IMO people who do not understand cardinal directions should never leave the house alone. ::: *

7

I think this method only works where a) the countryside is relatively flat, b) the highway system was built as a highway system, and not on top of pre-industrial roadways, and c) the traffic engineers were not either drug-addled or sadistic. Try driving in the NE U.S. sometime, where it is not unheard of for multiple roads to merge together for a time and for that piece of highway to be simultaneously the northbound segment of highway A and the southbound segment of highway B. Or the Boston city streets, which apparently were laid out by inebriated cattle.

8

Toss a few lakes, swamps and rivers into the mix, and a friend of mine was convinced th sun rose in the north at my house.

9

That’d leave a lot of room for the rest of us.

It always drives me nuts when people don’t get cardinal directions, but still ask for directions by phone.

“I’m at Church & 14th, how do I get to Divisadero & Fulton?”

“Head west on Church…”

“Is that left or right?”

How the hell am I supposed to know?! I don’t know what corner you’re on, nor which way you happen to be facing as you stand there speaking to me!

(In short, I agree.)

10

I understand cardinal directions just fine. I do not, however, have a compass in my brain. And thus I have difficulty figuring out which direction to turn at a corner to end up going North. Of course, I second-guessed the last person to give me left/right directions, and thus ended up driving around on snowy streets longer than I should have. (It was late, I was tired, and cold, and starting to get cranky. Not so much when he gave me the directions, but when I tried to follow them.)

Although, I was quite pleased with myself after I moved here that I correctly identified a map being used by a local park as being upside down. (North was at the bottom. I don’t know why.)

11

I must have some sort of a map to navigate. I have next to no short-term memory left and ten seconds after I hear driving directions recited at me, I will have forgotten them.

12

My dad had hours of stories from his AARP class.

He says some of the people there could hardly WALK, nevertheless have the physical capacity to actually driving a car.

When practicing head checking the blind spot, some could hardly turn their head more than 5 degrees from center.

“So if you can’t drive anywhere close to the speed limit you might need to think about saying off the hiways.”
“Yeah, but…don’t you think 55MPH is a bit…FAST?”

Then the subject of retesting came up and HOLY CRAP the lady he was in the group with almost got ATTACKED. Lots of them knew damn good and well they didn’t want a test required because they knew they couldn’t pass it.

13

For your own sanity, don’t ever drive in Spain. Or in most of Europe. Or in China, according to my Chinese classmates in Miami. Or in India, according to my Indian coworkers. Don’t even try it in Latin America, where people use compass points but they aren’t necessarily in the same place where a compass would have them (an example: in Costa Rica, if you’re north of San José, the road going to San José goes south even if it happens to be going west).

Compass points are for maps. Maybe. Not always. I mean, it depends on whether the area you need to picture has a general shape that will display properly on a standard-sized piece of paper that’s been placed horizontally and with “north” up top. If that’s not the case, then you get local reference points. For example, if you asked all the inhabitants of Barcelona to point “north”, about 20 people out of 3M would get it right: 10 completely at random, 6 know that the Meridiana (Meridian Avenue) actually follows one of the earth’s meridians so “on the meridiana going away from Plaza Les Corts is northward”, 4 sell compasses and are awake enough to remember how to use one.

Barcelona’s cardinal points, as 6M Catalans and several million regular visitors know are “mountain” (top of the map), “sea” (bottom of the map), “left” and “right” (of the map, with the Ramblas series of streets as the division line).