You know how you walk into a business, and there's a sign that says, "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone"? Personally, I had never been refused service, but I always thought to myself: Yeah, there's a lot of crazies out there! Keep that in mind as you read this, because at first it's going to be hard to see the connection.
My oldest daughter is turning 15 soon, and so it is time for her to learn to drive. Intellectually, I have no problem with this. She's smart, competent, a straight-A student, and very responsible. It's time for her to drive.
Her friend is also learning to drive, and because she has an older brother, I simply went with her parent's recommendations. They liked MasterDrive, which offers a closed course learn-to-drive kind of program to start, then they offer the basic 30 hours of classroom time and the basic 6 hours of on-the-road program. MasterDrive, though, is almost an hour away, so we decided to take advantage of their closed course program, but then go with somebody closer for the classroom instruction.
The MasterDrive experience was phenomenal. The kids spent most of their 8-hour days in the car, learning to drive, to avoid, how to get out of a skid, how to best stop quickly, and that sort of thing. I wasn't prepared for the intense emotion that I would have handing my keys over to my daughter that first day, though. I was excited, nervous, stressed, and I waited for the phone to ring all day. It all turned out okay, though, and on the second day, we got to ride in the car with her while she showed off what she could do. Watching her drive the car so condifidently was worth every penny we had spent on the program, even though this particular part of it doesn't count towards her permit or license.
We had the girls scheduled to do their 30 hours of classroom time at the Colorado Driving Institute over the Thanksgiving break. The parents were required to attend the first hour. I started to worry a little when we saw a video that they had edited down from a 9News special describing the reasons behind a new law that prohibits a newly licensed driver under 18 from carrying any other passengers except siblings and adults (no friends), and after 6 months, they can drive only one friend. The law came about, apparently, because of a terrible accident where four kids died. I know this because they kept showing pictures of the crumpled car, then the families crying, then crumpled car, siblings crying, crumpled car...well, you get the picture. There was no indication as to what caused the accident or what could have been done to prevent it. No indication, either, as to how this law applied, except, of course, that there were four teens in the car. Had there been four adults, would the accident have been avoided? Couldn't tell from the video.
That first day, apparently there was some more heavy-handed depictions of the fact that driving a car is fatally dangerous. A card game was played where the instructor handed out cards that were supposed to show the statistics of driving. Some were for a ticket, some were nothing, others were dying in a horrible accident. Except that the odds of a teen dying in an auto accident in Boulder County were told to me to be something like 1 in 300 (approximately), where there were 5 cards in the deck of roughly 20 that were the death card. I'm not particularly superstitous, but even I would have been horrified to have gotten the death card. Luckily, neither girl died in the card game.
Then when the kids got home, I learned that one of the homework assignments coming up was the kids were supposed to write a letter to their parents as though they (the kid) had died in an auto accident that they had caused. Not my child!
This is where my overwhelming parental instincts started kicking in. I made three calls to the Colorado Driving Institute. To their credit, they called me as soon as a manager came in, about 11:00 in the morning. We discussed the different philosophies, where I expressed horror at their heavy-handedness with the whole death thing, and they defended their tactics. I mostly stayed on message though: I would keep my daughter in the class if they could promise me that the death stuff was mostly behind us and they would concentrate on actual law. They said they would. I was also contacted by another lady who seemed even more concerned with my complaints, listened carefully to me, defended again their tactics, and again promised me less death, more law.
But then she called me that night. At this point, the kids are half way through the class. It would seem like a big waste of their time to pull them, but at the same time, I didn't want a kid that's going to be scared to death to get on the roads because of all of these messages of death. She was concerned because they were having a speaker the next day that was going to talk about trains, and she had a video. We can only imagine what was on the video. She very kindly offered that we could finish the class with the home school alternative, which we gratefully accepted.
The last day, when we went to turn in the materials that the girls had finished, I began to be aware of a lot of things that I should have noticed the first day. For instance, on a bulletin board outside the school, newspaper clippings of every fatal accident in Boulder County was posted. Inside, on the walls, there were messages about trains. Each little black-and-white pullout showed some depiction of death. My favorite was a kid in a body bag, with a title that said something like, "Daniel can't tell us why he was in such a hurry to beat the train that day." I wished I had taken note of that stuff earlier, but really at this point, since we did the home school version, it was really more amusing than anything else.
However, we weren't quite done yet. The nice lady came in after grading the work, and said that she had a concern that the kids had missed 6 questions each, and that they were the same 6 questions. There was a heavy implication there that the kids had cheated on the self test. Of course, there had never been any instructions about the self test, and the kids had each done them on their own, then had gone over them together, and then even gotten a parent involved to help them answer some of the problems. I didn't even realize, but the self test was generated by the Colorado Driving Institute, and I learned later from my daughter that there were a considerable number of misspellings in the test. When the other mom and I got a little huffy at her accusation, she changed tactics, and simply decided to go over the problems that they missed. Honestly, the questions that they missed were worded somewhat oddly. The one that I read from her said something like, "A light rail should always..." and there was an A, B, or C. But the answer that she said was right was the one that a car driver should do, which was B, obey all traffic signals and lights. When I argued with her that the question was from the point of view of the light rail, and not the girls, the lady replied somewhat testily that of course this was about the driver, the girls are never going to drive light rail.
I'm somewhat inclined to argue things, but I told myself, "Drop it, Lura. Just get through this." After two such questions, though, the CDI lady decided that maybe we would forget about the rest of the questions, gave us our certificate of completion, and we were all desperate to get out of each other's hair. But my friend, who still had visions of the kids doing the on-the-road classes locally, asked when we could sign up for those.
That's when we were told that CDI had decided not to do business with us any longer. I'd say we were too much of a pain in their ass. It was my first time being fired as a client! Of course, there was no amount of money or convenience that would have made me want to use them for any more of their driving classes, so it made no difference to me, but really, THEY didn't want to do business with ME?
So count me in as one of the crazy people that a company simply refuses to do business with. In this case, I'm okay with that.