Before I landed in the U.S., anytime someone announced, "I got a ticket", it was usually in a jubilant tone and meant a ticket to a highly sought after movie, concert or some such event. If the tone was flat, it'd mean - it was a bus/train ticket and was usually an FYI kind of deal.
The day I came home and announced to DH that I got a ticket, my mood was sombre - I was holding the citation I'd received a couple of hours before , in my hand.
I received a speeding ticket and had to take a traffic school ( concentration camp) course and finally a test. I was doing 40, supposedly, in a 25 mi/hr zone. I can vividly recall that day as I was listening intently to Jhumpa Lahiri speak with Terri Gross about her novel, The Namesake, which I had read and was enjoying listening to her interview. It wasn't like I was listening to some fast music. There were 4 or 5 cars ahead of me on this single lane painful street with 3 stop signs and it would have been impossible to go at 40. This cop who was camouflaging among the bushes came out of the hiding and was behind me. He was on a bike and put on his right turn indicator, meaning for me to pull over. I thought he wanted to make a right turn and kept driving at 20 like one of those annoying grannies. IMO, he got irked that I didn't pull over until I heard a siren and that caused him to write me that ticket. I tried explaining , very gently that I've always been a very careful and concious driver and have never violated any traffic/safety rules. He could have just given me a warning and let me off. Bike riding cops rarely let you go, the car driving ones are more mellow.
Neways, I had to pay a fine of $280 ( being made to stand for an hour and a half in the line at traffic court - chatted up with a gum chewing , braid sporting 21 yr old guy and a 40 something excessively made up woman). And then had to take the traffic school which is an online course of at least 6-8 hrs, it's the most excruciating thing on earth. The lessons are in the form of slides and every slide stays put on the screen for atleast 3-4 mins and there's no way to click the right arrow mark to proceed. The same rules are drummed and drilled into you in so many ways. One idea is presented as an entire paragraph with convoluted, repitious sentences - torture with tautology! It reminded me of a classmate in undergrad who'd copy from my test paper. If I wrote ' take a 5k resistor', he'd copy it as ' a 5K resistor is taken' - basically converting active to passive voice and vice versa, so it wouldn't be obvious he copied.
After every 3 or 4 slides there's a quiz, without correctly answering which , you cannot go ahead. If you answer 50% of them wrong, you've to repeat the lesson. Each lesson is about 35 slides long. I was dizzy, nauseous and cursed that cop for putting me through this torment. The course assumes you're a victim of amnesia and starts at a level below when you took the test for obtaining learner's permit- before you ever got behind the darn wheel! It's not like I had forgotten every basic road sense by violating that speed limit. The only thing that'd be worse than traffic school is if they start punishing people physically, like whipping them for such traffic violations. Why can't they come up with something far more meaningful like send violators to exercise boot camps - running, strength training, abs and push-ups, weights between 6 am and 7 am for a month. Or mandatory personal training sessions - so they get the satisfaction of having punished us and we also benefit from the hard labor and hours put in? Gosh, I spent 2 full days of the weekend grudgingly going through the whole course material ( with DH smiling like Satan from time to time) only at the end of which, I could register for the test I had to appear for at a designated testing centre. I had to answer 50 heckling questions , of the same painful nature as those in the lessons, got 47 of them right and passed the test.
Have you ever received a traffic ticket? Do share your experinces.
