![]() Whoa, just as the “I don’t think that was the real DMV guy,” light bulb went on in my head, another man approached my car and he was carrying a clip-board. Before I could finish pondering how bizarre the man’s comments seemed, he crossed back over to the curb side, picked up a discarded cigarette butt off the street, popped it in his mouth, and then disappeared around the corner. ![]() “Remember to turn right when you want to go right, and turn left when you want to go left, and you will do just fine,” he instructed. Then the man proceeded to offer me some strange advice, which confused me even more. “Well, at least he seems very friendly,” I thought of the DMV examiner. Then it dawned on me that my Hawaiian t-shirt had a small picture of Einstein in the upper right corner. Ready to take your test?” “Why was he calling me Einstein?” I wondered, and “was that a good thing or a bad thing?” Although Einstein was one of the greatest physicists of all time, he definitely was not known for his good looks. In a loud voice, he said, “Good morning, Einstein. About five minutes into the wait, I looked up and saw a man dressed in a dark t-shirt and faded jeans, and sporting straggly shoulder length hair, approach my car. So with typical test anxiety, I drove my car up to the designated starting area in the DMV parking lot and waited for the next available examiner. “Touch the painted white line of a bike lane or turn into a crosswalk with a pedestrian (no matter how long the crosswalk is or how far away the pedestrian is relative to your car) and its game over man,” one of my friends warned. Also, the Pleasanton DMV examiners have a reputation for being especially tough on the crosswalks and the bike lanes. Like deciding which parent to listen when one tells you to do the opposite of what the other told you to do (usually they are unaware of this), you feel like the law is going to crack down across your shoulders regardless of what you do. Especially tricky are the ones that have right turn lanes that split off in a Y shaped fashion that are sandwiched between two different traffic signals: a signal light immediately to the left and a merge sign immediately to the right. One reason is that the Pleasanton DMV is situated in an area that has several complicated intersections that are often used in the test. The Contra Costa Times newspaper published an article about it, titled “Scary Larry, a driving test examiner with a reputation for failing grades, retires.” Despite the fact I knew I would no longer have to worry about facing Scary Larry when I signed up for the exam last August, I was still very nervous. ![]() So when Scary Larry announced his retirement two years ago, after working 20 years for the California DMV, it was big news amongst us teenagers. That was because the toughest driving examiner in the history of mankind worked there – a man everyone simply called “Scary Larry.” Well, okay, maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration about Scary Larry (aka Larry Chan), but rumor has it that he did fail ALOT of teenagers. The Pleasanton DMV used to be one of the last places teenagers in the Tri-Valley would want to go to get their license.
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