SRL & Driving

Training and Traveling for SRL
Soon after I joined SRL, and was assigned to Field Operations, I was joining Mati Frankel in training the many interviewers we hired, generally for a particular survey, though some were frequent contractees. I found the methods used here were very different from what we knew in India. Almost all interviews were either by mail or on the phone, or the first kind followed by the second. Nobody walked into homes unannounced like we did in HLL or Kumar's Population Survey, or any other that I had known of. Probably would have got a cold shoulder if not, as much later, the extreme treatment meted out to the young Japanese student who was shot dead when he tapped on a Florida house for a Halloween trick or treat! SoI had to also learn some of the key points about such interview techniques . Since SRL did surveys for the State of Illinois, the University, and other public institutions, we sometimes had to train interviewers in different cities in the state.

I also had to help in driving the one office car we had on such trips. One day Matti sat next to me as I practised using a big car and one with power steering and brakes for the very first time. Everything went fine till I decided to try the brakes. There was a screech of tires behind me as I braked as I would do in India and suddenly brought our car to a dead stop. The next second a hard-breathing truck driver was giving me a hostile look, as he demanded to know why I jammed the brakes on a straight empty road! That was however the only incident in all the three years in Urbana with all the driving I did in town and long distance on the office car or others later.

Soon I had to get my local driving licence, having run to the end of the period I could use my Indian one here. As elsewhere in the USA, I had to pass an eyesight test including one for color blindness, and a test upon my ability to recognise the many traffic signs [one cannot get even one wrong] and a multiple-choice test [only 5% off is allowed], before a road test. The inspector sitting next to me on that one commented I was driving fine, and asked who had taught me. So I proudly said it was my father. The very last instruction was to park – the road was fairly empty and I thought this was a cinch. But he gently asked me when I looked at him in expectation after stopping if I had not forgotten something. I then recalled the rule about parking uphill and the other about downhill. So I turned the front wheels away from the curb [we were facing uphill] – this was in case the parking brake got disengaged and the car started to roll down.

Ramu had however to go for a second test, after he was flunked for just one driving 'error' – he turned into the second lane of an one-way road, when he should have been in the closest one. We were told that almost all foreign students, especially men, had to go a second time to get their licences!
But these incidents drove home to me how meticulous the authorities here were – compare these to my own experience in obtaining my scooter and my car licences in India [see above]. As for today, the less said the better!

Perhaps it was the first summer that Ramu and I took our defensive driving course – a great idea that trained us to be always on the defensive on the road, assuming that anything might go wrong any moment. This does not mean that one clamps down on the brake, but to anticipate the other drivers' actions and plan to react as one might need to if they did the wrong thing.