Two wheels good.

Talk about your cars etc here. Keep it sort of sensible and on topic please.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Stop me if I'm boring you here guys.





Examiners.





Now I've already told you about our local examiner so let's discuss the other two who were not only based in Chester and Widnes but used to cover our local test centre on holidays and overtime.





This is a tale of two Daves.





Firstly there was Daffy Duck Dave, so called because of the Daffy Duck tie he wore to the office. He's the sort of prim and proper person who put his immaculately ironed hi-viz on to walk to his mk1 Toyota Avensis and then fold it up on the back seat before getting in to conduct a bike test. I never knew him to ride a bike although he was a decent guy and friendly enough. He used to invite me along for a ride along although I never summed up enough courage to ask him why he drove his Avensis automatic locked onto second gear for the entire duration of a test.





The second Dave was someone we referred to as Dave The Cunt. He worked almost exclusively out of the Chester test centre and was unaffected by the Pan Euro ban due to being a BMW rider. An ex-military man he expected candidates to be turned out in the right gear and for it to be clean and presentable which if I'm being totally honest was a higher standard than even us instructors managed! It was hard work to keep yourself from uttering 'oh fuck it's him' over the one way radio when turning up at a test centre and seeing his 1100RT parked outside.





Give me a few mins and I'll make a start on the next chapter.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Here we go again with another almost true but partially fictitious chapter ...





Sometimes things don't go according to plan.





Now your average CBT candidate counts down the days until his 16/17th birthday when he can finally hit the road. It's his/her first taste of independence and if you're 16 you can't wait to be signed off and collect your scooter and cause mayhem while a 17-year-old sees this as their first step to a full licence and finally getting that restricted SV650 or Bandit. In both cases, they're jumping up and down outside the gates before you get there in youthful excitement. Sadly for the instructor, whether he be a taxi driver or a publican it's just another day at the office and to be honest we'd rather be still drinking or tucked up in bed. Most of us are capable of conducting a CBT in our sleep and according to my then girlfriend, I actually did just that once! The DSA have strict guidelines on how long the off road compound element of a CBT should last but as this is a work of fiction and I'm amongst friends I'll tell you the truth and say it lasts as long until the instructor thinks he stands a sporting chance of passing a police breathalyzer. Sometimes things go almost well with both pupils having similar levels of ability and learning curves my I can assure you that this is rarely the case. CBTs were booked in where one guy was a 16 year old who'd been riding stolen scooters for years and positively romped through the compound work while the other punter was a lady who couldn't even ride a push bike and had zero balance.





Shall I talk about the various punters that went through our door next?
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Over the years a few incidents are burned into my brain, for example, the other instructor had a test scheduled and all went well until the test finished and the happy punter had passed their full A licence, all good so far but when it was time to return to base the instructor realised that his ER-5 had run out of fuel. No problem, give the pupil a pilly back and then summon help. I walked over to the test centre to recover the dry Kawasaki from what was then my home a few hundred yards away from the test centre with a can of unleaded but no funnel. Fortunately, the pupil had left their complimentary copy of Ride On, the magazine given to all newly passed riders behind the test centre wall so I made a cone out of it and filled the bike up. Having no way of carrying the can back to base I left it behind the wall before returning the ER-5 back to base. So far so good. The other instructor then offered to give me a lift home which I obviously accepted and made a mental note of picking up the petrol can on our way back. We got back as far as 250 yards away from the test centre only to find the whole area cordoned off by the police due to a bomb scare at the test centre, yes a car examiner known as Grizzly Adams had seen my fuel can and as this was the week following the 7/7 bombings had decided to report it as a suspect package. Needless to say the bomb squad were less than impressed with his somewhat overzealous reporting...
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Being a biker focused outfit as opposed to wannabe bile plod we were somewhat treated with disdain by the other training schools. One instructor decided to have a sign made saying "Advanced Instructor" stuck to his fairing, needless to say within 24 hours I had a sign made saying the opposite (I'm being careful not to fall foul of our new rules here) on the front of my bike.



Here's a handy tip. You'd think it was perfectly reasonable to ask what the pass rate at a school was right? Well, pass percentages only tell half the story. Other outfits would never dream of renting out a bike to a customer just to take their test on without selling them a full training course first, we'd happily rent you a bike under those circumstances. Whether the punter passes or fails isn't exactly our fault, is it?



Anyway, one such lad was taken to the test centre by myself and no further thought was given until after an hour neither him or the examiner had returned back to base. The time ticked away and I was getting worried when after an hour and a half both returned back to the test centre. It turns out that he was doing a double length test after a disqualification! He passed quite comfortably and our favourite examiner mentioned that the lad had been to his house several times before, no problem until the punter said he had to take an extended test because he was caught riding under the influence of drugs! Needless to say the examiner went home that night and quizzed his son about his mate's drug use and whether he was using himself!



Another time I'd dropped a learner off for his test who I'd actually taught. Now this lad was fucking huge complete with a moon pie face and learning difficulties but I'd managed to get him up to the required standard and was hopeful of a pass. 20 minutes later the examiner rode back into the test centre car park alone. Now that had never happened to me before but I was pretty certain it wasn't a good omen. Apparently, he'd got as far as the U Turn exercise and put his foot down, an automatic fail as he very well knew and then promptly got off the bike, took his helmet off, launched it over a wall and started crying! He was sobbing "I want Warren" at the top of his voice while seated on the kerb.....





I'll share more tales soon folks!
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Here's some light relief.



One Saturday I was taking a couple of pupils out for some general road work, nothing too taxing and easy money for yours truly. One pupil was a truck driver and the other was a recently divorced lady who fancied herself as a bike chick.



We left the compound on time and headed over to the petrol station to fill the bikes up. After topping up I headed into the shop to pay and was greeted by an attendant that knew me a bit from going there in the middle of the night to fill up my taxi. The conversation went as follows...



"That girl you're teaching today Warren has a great figure" said the attendant.

"Yeah but she's got a face like a smacked arse" I replied.



I then casually strolled back out to see her hunched over the bike crying, yes dickhead here had totally forgot that he was wearing his one way microphone and both pupils could clearly hear the conversation I had with the attendant.



The following two hours seemed one hell of a lot longer.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Let's continue with the novel.



One lunchtime back in 2005 I'd nipped over to Liverpool (on the boss's Fireblade) to collect some legal stationery and as I was on my way back I noticed a couple of lads on sportsbikes having a hoon. Naturally, I joined in and much fun was had between the traffic lights and general two-wheeled delinquency. Eventually, we were getting close to the training compound so I backed off only to be surprised to see the aforementioned sportsbikes pulling into our compound! Obviously, I was shitting myself that they were going to report me because the recognised the bike I was riding so I mentally prepared some bullshit excuse and followed them in. I took off my helmet and the senior instructor calmly said that "I believe you're already acquainted with your 2pm CBT". Yep, these two lads had been riding illegally for decades and now Merseyside Police had started getting themselves ANPR cameras they'd decided to finally get their full licences. The irony was that although both were highly skilled riders one of them took three attempts to finally pass the ministry test. For a non-judgemental training establishment like ourselves, the 2005 introduction of ANPR was a great moneymaking year for "teaching" learners who'd been riding for decades. Plenty of times we put hardcore 1%er riders through their tests with little or no effort required. Some of these fuckers you really wouldn't argue with so I was happy that they all seemed to pass without any issues.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Let's talk about the police for a bit. Nowadays if you're a serving police officer and fancy becoming a police motorcyclist Merseyside Police will no longer train you to pass your CBT and full licence before training you up on their motorcycle traffic division, they only choose riders with a full motorbike licence. This, coupled with an apparent macho sportsbike riding on your day off culture of serving police officers meant that we always had a policeman or two going through our system at any one time. They could be neatly fitted into one of two groups. The first group was the perfect type of pupil, they listened attentively and were great at following instructions while the second group were by far the biggest bunch of know it all arseholes you could ever imagine, ironically serving traffic officers usually fitted in the second group and regardless of riding ability hated to be corrected on the proper riding procedures, especially off some scruffy fucker who they'd already made a mental note of to breath test them next time they saw me on the road.



Another issue that was personal to me was that they had a police traffic officer who loved picking on us taxi drivers. This prick took great delight in singling me out because he was the brother of our next door neighbour from hell who still goes out of her way to make my ex-wife's life a living nightmare. Now, this prick was keen on the "nothing personal, just doing my job and how's Alison (my ex-wife)?" attitude whenever he decided to visit our compound to distribute Bikesafe leaflets. Obviously I never once bore a grudge and made him a coffee after rimming the cup with my cock... Ironically the only other time I've done that was to Anneka Rice and her glass of orange juice but that's another story.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Now picture the scene. It's a sunny Saturday morning and I thought I'd take my two learners out for a little ride around rural Wirral. I find this lovely little country lane that's a dead end with no through traffic and as I'm due a fag break I decide to pull over and let my pair of newbies practice their U turns on our shiny, new and whisper quiet CG125s. all was going well until a pair of wrought iron electric gates silently opened and a bloke who looked like the chairman of the local golf club strode out with a face that nowadays we'd call "gammon" demanding that we take our lesson elsewhere or we'd feel the full force of the law upon us. Now being a responsible citizen I did just that. As an aside we had a display rack back at our base full of cheap motorcycle chains and locks which I most certainly didn't grab a handful of and chain his electric gates together that evening.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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I suppose I should give this thread another thrilling chapter.



Let's talk about one particular chap we called CorsaBoy due to him financing a Corsa C and giving it the full Max Power treatment.



CorsaBoy used to work on the docks (Sounds like the opening of a Bon Jovi tune) and loved to tell us tales of collecting and delivering various supercars along with his stories of when he was a rally navigator and liked to tell us that he's buying an R1 when he breezes through his test despite us saying that he'd be better with a 600 Bandit. Undeterred the owner of the training school was keen to shift on his 2002 Honda Fireblade (after bodging the gearbox) and after finding out this info demanded that we give him first refusal. Now there was no fucking way we'd let him test ride it without either paying for it or at the very least passing his test first but to silence his whining I agreed to give him a pilly run on the back up the M53. CorsaBoy insisted that he wouldn't be scared by a bit of speed and requested that I showed him what the bodged Honda could do, fair enough. As it was a quiet Sunday morning I took him on the back at sane speeds around town until I hit the start of the motorway whereupon I then unleashed all 160bhp in all the gears (except the bodged third) until we ran up to about 160ish before looping a fast roundabout at junction 4 and then nailing it again of the homeward leg of our fast and very illegal test ride. After returning back to our compound I discovered to my dismay that my arse was wet through, CorsaBoy despite his demands for speed had managed to piss himself and in the process piss over me as well. Lacking any excuse that would leave him any credibility he apologised and ate humble pie for the next two hours. Eventually after passing his test, first time in his credit, he bought a GSX600F and never spoke again about his tolerance of speed.
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Re: Two wheels good.

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Let's talk a little more about our wide cross section of pupils.



One lad I remember was a 20 year old that we called Marilyn due to his habit of wearing Marilyn Manson T Shirts.



Now Marilyn had a few quirks. He was a diabetic who was into self harm but was gifted at IT and wasn't short of cash in his job of troubleshooting EPOS systems at supermarkets. He drove a 18 month old company Focus that he had picked all the foam off the steering wheel because it distracted him from cutting himself with a razor blade. Now Marilyn was a pretty good rider but for some reason he just couldn't get himself to get through the test much to our dismay. On his third and final unsuccessful attempt with us we rode back quickly to our training compound because his diabetes was playing up and he urgently needed sugar which shouldn't be a problem as he had left a Mars Bar in our office. Sadly Andy, the new owner of our school, had seen said Mars Bar and thinking it was mine had decided to eat it...



Another pupil we called Danny Six Tests due to how many attempts it took him to get through. Danny was a nice enough lad but he sure had his quirks. He had bought a 535 Virago in anticipation of getting his full licence and left it with us at our compound while he was learning and used to visit often to modify it to how he wanted it. Now Danny was resigned to never getting a girlfriend so he modified his Virago to being a single seat. When I say seat I mean some sheet steel covered in vinyl. Sadly his Virago shat its main bearings a week after passing his test so he pushed it to a local bike shop. When he was told how much it'd cost to fix it he asked the owner of the bike shop to buy it. Now obviously the owner of the bike shop wasn't really interested so for a laugh he offered £15 which Danny happily accepted. Obviously, this pissed me off no end as I'd of offered £20.
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