They say that learning to drive is one of the hardest things you will ever learn to do. My friend's driving instructor kept telling her that learning to drive is around 70 per cent instruction and 30 per cent practice. This means you need to put in a tremendous amount of practice on top of your lessons. The problem for my friend when she was learning was that she only had one car in her family ? actually, it was more like a van ? and her dad used it all the time for his heavy duty shelving business.



He is a hard worker, my friend's dad, and he often works late into the night on week days. He delivers and constructs heavy duty shelving all over the south of England and often gets home late after a long day of travelling, which did not leave my friend too much time to practice her driving. It also meant that he was too tired on the weekends to be sticking the L plates on the van and worrying about whether his daughter was about to wreck his van ? and his livelihood!

So eventually they were forced to come up with a solution. My friend took a week off work and went to work with her dad. Her dad loved it because for the first time ever he had an assistant who he could tell what to and send out for the teas while he built the heavy duty shelving. The advantage for my friend ? apart from a week building up her muscles by carrying around heavy duty shelving ? was that she got to drive the van all week, getting some much needed practice at the wheel.

By the time of her next driving lesson, her driving instructor noticed a vast improvement in her driving, particularly in her confidence levels, which had previously been quite low. All of a sudden she was the queen of the road ? hardly surprising after a week driving around a van full of heavy duty shelving for hours on end. Not long after that her instructor said that she was ready to take her test and she passed first time. One of the things the examiner commented on at the end of the test was how smooth and fluid her driving was. She explained that she had done a lot of practice driving her heavy duty shelving around in her dad's van, and that she had learnt to be very careful because he kept telling her off for going round corners too fast and sending the heavy duty shelving in the back flying in all directions.

The examiner looked a little surprised and thought she was joking, but when they got back to the test centre he noticed her dad waiting to find out the result. His eyes were immediately drawn to the ?Heavy Duty Shelving? sign on his van. ?Who would've thought it, heavy duty shelving. You won't find that in any driving manuals,? he joked.