LIFE, I'VE FOUND, is quite a testing business, and that's precisely what makes living so arduous - all those tests, seemingly at every corner of existence. Which is why I have a fair amount of sympathy for a particularly hapless pensioner across the waves in Canada.

The story about his ordeal didn't mention his name, but that's not really germane. What is important is that this 83-year-old gent tangled with a test, and he ran into it, among other things. It was his driving test.

Our hero, it seems, failed, which is bad enough. What got him into the newspapers was that he then proceeded to back his car through the plate glass window at the test center in British Columbia, thanks to mistaking the accelerator for the brake.

For his efforts, he was rewarded with a charge of unsafe driving. And by the time he gets his driver's license back, he'll probably be pushing the pedal to the metal through the Pearly Gates.

I sympathize with the poor boob, because the roadway that I call my passage through this life has been one long cobblestone alley pockmarked by those pitfalls they call tests - in classrooms, behind the wheel on the highway, at the controls of an airplane, facing an eye chart.

It was in Mrs. Rule's seventh-grade English class at Christenberry Junior High that I ran afoul of a wretched test. Early in a written exam, she asked that we identify a mongoose that popped up in a story by Kipling or somesuch, and I was rewarded with an "F," which certainly didn't stand for effort.

The creature was, in fact, named "Rikki Tikki Tavi," which Mrs. Rule had written on the blackboard. Being unable to see the blackboard (except that it was green), let alone anything written on it, I supplied as my answer the name as I heard it: "Ricky Ticky Taffy." Thus my first crash at the test hurdle.

(Without specs, my eyes perceived a world full of soft, fuzzy edges, and nothing over the decades has changed. A few days ago, I went through another boring eye test that came to its usual abrupt end when, upon being asked to read the top letter on the chart on the wall, I told the optician, "Point me to the wall.")

My next test crisis came at Duke University in an unfortunate encounter with trigonometry, a subject that, as far as I am concerned, has all the comprehensibility of ancient Greek as translated in Sanskrit and written in Russian Cyrillic on blotting paper during a tropical storm on a Thursday afternoon.

The "18" I scored out of a possible 100 on the final exam set a low-tide mark in trig that has never even been approached in the nearly a century that the tortuous subject has been taught at Duke, I'm told. I gave up any hopes of a career in nuclear physics on or about the same day.

In my latter youth and early manhood, one of the major annoyances I found with life in the United States was that every state has its own driving laws - and that each state demands that if you live there, you have to get that state's particular driver's license.

Which meant a driving test.

My peripatetic career as a journalist, alas, meant frequent moves from state to state - which meant facing the dreaded driving test about three minutes after I got the furniture moved in.

Somehow, on the roads of Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and New York, I managed to avoid failure behind the wheel, but it was not from lack of trying. On at least three occasions - and on one of which I stalled the car five times - I had the feeling that the test examiner flipped a mental coin as to whether I passed or failed.

Thus it was with a sensation that I somehow had discovered the Holy Grail that, on moving to London, I found that once you had passed the British driving test, a license was yours for life and that never again would you have to get into a car and prove that you actually knew how to drive the damned thing.

Oh, you can lose your license here from doing such things as conjuring up pink elephants after a particularly liquid night at the boozer. In my case, I have never been tempted to drink and drive, because I know that if I did and got caught at it, a repeat of the wretched driving test awaited me.

Once was enough. That was back in 1969, and it was an occasion that I would equate with downing a couple of dozen six-day-old oysters, touring the cave complexes of southeast Afghanistan or marrying the Creature from the Black Lagoon for a third time.

Fully aware of my past close calls with driving examiners, I prepared for this one by forking out the British equivalent of a couple of hundred dollars for a driving instructor who insisted on calling me "Squire," to teach me how to do on the streets of London what I'd been doing on the roads of four continents for the previous 16 years.

On the big day, I met my test examiner who, after viewing my offered handshake like some sort of five-headed cobra at the end of a white stick, allowed as how "I would like for you to know from the start that I don't like Americans."

Thus began the longest 22 minutes of my life, during which I choked the car down twice, let it roll back eight feet, nearly hitting another car, hit the curb trying to back around a corner, and drew an instant mental blackout when, as an oral test, he asked me why I should keep the tires of my car properly inflated.

After a couple of days pondering, I ventured, "Because it makes the thing roll better?" "Yes," he replied, "and how about wear and tear on the tires?" Yeah, I agreed.

"And steering control?" he said. Uh, huh, that too. "And vehicular safety?" Yep to that, too, once my addled mind had sorted out the word "vehicular."

For reasons that have left me baffled ever since, he passed me. Thankfully, I've never had to repeat that driving test, because if I did I'm sure that no plate glass window within six city blocks would be safe.

Thought for the Week: Money talks, but mostly what it says is goodbye.

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