Friday, 8 February 2008

A "quick" lesson in equal opportunities

Despite the "evidence" in yesterday's entry, of the increased ability of women to "multi-task", it is clear that they are no more able to limit the speed of their car to within the national speed limit than men are.

This, I (personally) established yesterday by attending a 'Speed Awareness' Training course, along with an equal mix of men and women.

Two facts struck me from the outset.

The first was that the participants for this course whilst all having one thing in common - namely that we had been"caught" speeding - were, from an equal opportunities perspective, "ideally balanced".

As well as balanced on gender, we were also, suspiciously, evenly mixed between young and old, ethnic and non ethnic, AND we had two trainers one of whom had a disability!

This "nirvana" for EO officials (I can imagine them ticking all of the boxes of their forms - in triplicate - as I write) also led me to question whether we had in fact been caught or had in fact been "targeted".

The second fact that struck me was that 'Speed Awareness' was not a very good course title. We were all very aware of speed, having recently experienced lots of it. In fact there is also (allegedly) photographic evidence to prove this if the course organisers had been in any doubt.

What we needed to increase our "awareness of" was going slow. A 'Dawdling' or 'Crawling' awareness course was what we needed.

That being said, the course was very good, although the most stressful part was ensuring that we weren't caught speeding either on the way to, or possibly worse, on the way from the course!

I'm not sure whether I bought in to all of the "learning" for as I slowly drove home I did start to think that the government's latest 'Road Safety' campaign -

'Speed Kills, Kill Your Speed",

to be somewhat factually incorrect.

Speed doesn't kill! Hitting people with a car kills. Admittedly more so when you hit them with a very fast car.

So speed isn't a problem, just like fatty food doesn't make you overweight...... unless you eat it that is!

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