I really appreciate that some of you note, flag, are concerned when there isn’t an episode of this show someday.

Some of you write to me because it’s the commute home time and you’re used to having your daily elects by then.

But yeah, I just, there was no particular reason I didn’t have one yesterday, I just ran out of time and then was thinking about it while trick-or-treating and thought, oh, maybe I’ll do it when I come home and then I decided, you know what, no, I’m not gonna.

I’m gonna save it for today.

Will today be 10 minutes or five minutes?

As you probably already know from your podcast player, five, I’ve got a call in six minutes, so I can’t go extra long.

♪ Your daily elects ♪ Got a little bit, a little, excuse me, I could start over, but now we’ll just go with my inability to speak and then go from there.

We’re gonna start with the driving test.

So as I believe I mentioned on this podcast, Ani passed the driving exam, is now a licensed driver in the state of New Jersey.

The only rule is Ani can’t drive between 11 p.m.

and 5 a.m., but frankly, I can barely do so either, so I get it.

But yeah, the driving test happens, Ani passes, Ani went through it very slowly, it’s all good, and then as a disciplined citizen, which is also a good name for a rock band, as a disciplined citizen, I called up the insurance company.

Actually, I started online, and USAA lets you do things through the app and through the website, and so I was like, hey, I have a new licensed driver, because initially when I added Ani to the insurance, there was no cost.

A driver who is in the learning process doesn’t add anything to your insurance bill.

But now, Ani was a licensed driver, so it needed to get added to my insurance bill.

And boy, is that absolutely no fun.

So I’m doing it online, and it’s like, okay, we’re gonna increase your insurance bill by this exorbitant amount, thousands of dollars, more than doubling your current insurance bill.

And I’m like, well, this can’t possibly, something is going wrong.

So I call, and then the person on the phone was like, wow, yeah, that’s a big increase.

Let’s see what we can do.

And eventually the conclusion was nothing.

Like, yep, that’s how much it goes up.

In part, it’s because I have a Tesla, right?

And so they’re like, yeah, new licensed drivers on Teslas apparently were making more expensive, I don’t know.

Which to me is crazy, because they can just drive themselves, right?

Just kidding.

And so the person on the phone was like, well, what you could do is take defensive driving courses.

All three of the licensed drivers in the house could take them, and it’ll save you more than $1,000 over three years.

And actually close to $2,000 over three years.

And so we said, fine, we’ll do that.

And when I was looking it up, I didn’t realize at first that the defensive driving classes could happen entirely online.

Like, you don’t have to go anywhere.

That makes it easier.

There are a variety of companies that do these defensive driving classes, and it’s clearly all a scam.

By which I mean, I think the state had good intentions in having these classes, but the companies that do them are ridiculous.

Like, I believe that the state requires, at least in New Jersey, that you spend a certain amount of time on the education and test.

So you’re reading these articles, you’re reading this step-by-step thing through the training class, and there are timers for when you can click the next button.

So you’ll have like maybe 200 words on the page and a four-minute timer before you can click the next button.

I did not look at messing around with the JavaScript to see if I could shorten that timer.

I wanted the test to be valid, but you would wait for forever to click the next button, and then eventually you get to quizzes, and then you take the quizzes, and then you go to the next thing, and everything takes forever, and it’s extremely poorly written.

It’s riddled with grammatical errors, and it’s also full of anecdotes and actual news stories, right, like so-and-so crashed into so-and-so, or so-and-so was angry and got into a road rage incident with this person.

The writing is terrible, like atrociously bad.

This isn’t me as a hoity-toity writer-type person saying this.

This is terrible writing, and just painfully, painfully slow, and I did it all in one day because I could leave it up on one screen while I was doing work on the other screen.

Lauren did it all in one day, but it took much, much longer because doing it on the phone apparently also really sucked.

If you did it on the phone, you couldn’t navigate away from the page, like you couldn’t open another app or the timer would reset, horrible.

I did it on a Mac, which is definitely the better way, and you can save your progress, so Ani is still in the midst of doing that test with a promise to finish it by the end of the week, but man, oh, man, I will say, I thought and still believe that the person on the phone with USA was implying that I could not take the test and just claim to have taken the, not take the course and claim to have taken the course, and that that would be just as good, but I didn’t do that.

It was $18 to take the course per person, so we all are just doing it, and that’s how I’m saving money on my insurance without switching to Geico.

Lex.