Must be all that pent-up testosterone.

I have finished online traffic school.  And although I said otherwise on their mandatory course evaluation survey (they have my completion certificate on their servers and I'm paranoid), I really would not recommend these people to anyone.

Their website was pedestrian, not particularly interesting, and written for fifth-graders. (They also did not explain why you got a question wrong, simply telling you to go back and re-read the chapter.) On one chapter, I answered a question correctly, had it marked wrong, and then re-answered it using all the answers in turn, and the correct answer was finally marked correct.  It cost me probably twenty minutes, and six weeks off my life in frustration.* There is a downside to going the cheap route. (I do so wish I had had the extraneous $200 to blow on the MCLE4Lawyers traffic school.  It at least would have been better written than this site.) On the other hand, they recycled the questions for the final from the questions in the quizzes, so all I had to do was remember what I had answered the first time.

These people went off the rails when it came to the DUI chapter, however.** Drinking was evil incarnate.  They went into how much alcohol damages your body.  It read much like a DARE pamphlet.  And even when they came back to driving, the subject they were supposed to be lecturing me about, they tended to be seriously over the top.  My favorite paragraph:

How much does alcohol affect your driving? Your awareness of your surroundings decreases in proportion to how many drinks you have had. As a driver's awareness and intelligence decreases, physical impotence increases. One psychologist put it quite well, saying “Nothing like alcohol to increase the desire and reduce the ability.” And an impotent drinking driver is a danger to others on the road, as well as to his own safety.

I know guys sometimes use their vehicles to compensate for deficiencies in other areas, but really.

*I was going to say six months, and then decided, no, it had been frustrating, but not that frustrating. I am working on my tendency to blow small things out of all proportion.  Fixing that personality flaw may make me a decidedly less interesting person, but it will make life easier for everybody who has to deal with me on a daily basis.
**The chapter on defensive driving had its own surreal moments, but that's for another post.