The instructor's checklist

A driving instructor in Buraidah has eight lessons a day, back to back, forty-five minutes each. The school hands him a sheet for every learner. Mirrors. Signals. Reverse parking. Roundabouts. He ticks the boxes, signs at the bottom, and the next learner gets in.

It is possible to spend years like that, and plenty of people do. The day turns into a column of ticks that belongs to someone else: the school's timetable, the authority's test, the sheet. Even done well, it is a day handed over.

Every so often, though, he does something the sheet never asks for. He notices that the young man gripping the wheel is not bad at roundabouts, he is frightened of them, because of something that once happened to his uncle. He pulls over and they talk about that for five minutes instead. Or a woman in her fifties, learning for the first time, mentions that she wants to take her mother to appointments without waiting for anyone. Suddenly the lesson has a point.

Those five minutes are on nobody's list. They are the part of the job he remembers, and the part his learners remember too.

There are people in the car with us all day, in one form or another. Colleagues, customers, whoever is across the counter. Each of them could bring something to the day that no sheet would think to include, if we cared to meet them rather than process them.

A day is not a small thing to give away, and handing every hour of it to someone else's list is a strange way to spend one.