Five Dollars Here, Five Dollars There, Before You Know it the State of Florida Considers You an Educated Driver

When I was preparing to get my Florida driver's license, I took the "drug and alcohol" course required for all new driver's license applicants. I still don't know if I needed to take it (as it turned out, I didn't have to do anything else but pay the fee and have my photo taken, since I had previously been licensed in Missouri, a long time ago), but I took it.

Now I'm taking the "mature driver course," because hey, it costs five bucks (where I'm taking it -- more on that below) and supposedly gets me a break on insurance premiums of some kind. Also, I thought I might learn something.

As far as learning anything goes, both these courses are a complete bust. I already knew that driving while intoxicated was bad before I took the drug and alcohol course, and the mature driver's course is just a bunch of re-hashed basic driver information combined with cautions about how as you get older you may have hearing, vision, and memory problems, arthritis, etc. ... and should be really, really careful.

The real bummer is that both of these courses are four hours long ... whether you want them to be or not.

Each page of course information has a timer for "time required to spend on this page." Including three mandatory breaks of, IIRC, 12 minutes or so. You can't proceed until the timer expires.

I haven't looked up the statutes governing this stuff, but you just know that the people lobbying for these courses to be required/offered, with a tie-in to driver licensing, got a requirement to the effect that "the course shall encompass no fewer than four hours of instruction" or whatever, even though what you might really need to know comes to 15 minutes or so, after which it's three hours and 45 minutes of 1) repetition, 2) horror stories to drive home the points, and 3) sitting there waiting for the timer to finish running.

Of course, there's nothing to stop you from getting up and taking out the garbage, trying yet another tip/trick for getting your scooter started, watching a music video, or whatever ... as long as you keep the course window open so the timer doesn't stop.

Other than the stupid timers, the courses are simple, the quizzes and finals are easy (and it's all "open book"), and the courses are cheap  -- I get mine from $5 Traffic School (not an affiliate link), which is exactly what it sounds like, except that the drug and alcohol course adds a $3 state fee of some kind.

I've been doing the mature driver course over the last couple of days, in between doing other stuff. I should finish it this evening.