Chicago DUI attorney comments on driver's licenses and perseverance

This Chicago DUI attorney thinks perseverance counts an awful lot.

Do you even remember what it was like when you finally got your driver’s license?

I do.  Friends may laugh but I didn’t pass it the first time, when I was fifteen, because South Carolina required parallel parking.  I think that initial trauma is why I’m pretty good at getting into and out of some of the smallest parking spaces in this city.  It’s also amusing because I don’t think I’m a decent measurer, by sight, of much else besides a parking space.

Can you imagine what it must feel like to have to take the driving test again and again and again and again and again before finally getting your driver’s license?

September 3, Sinchon, South Korea:

 

This diminutive woman, now known nationwide as “Grandma Cha Sa-soon,” has achieved a record that causes people here to first shake their heads with astonishment and then smile: She failed her driver’s test hundreds of times but never gave up. Finally, she got her license — on her 960th try.

For three years starting in April 2005, she took the test once a day five days a week. After that, her pace slowed, to about twice a week. But she never quit.

Hers is a fame based not only on sheer doggedness, a quality held in high esteem by Koreans, but also on the universal human sympathy for a monumental — and in her case, cheerful — loser.

“When she finally got her license, we all went out in cheers and hugged her, giving her flowers,” said Park Su-yeon, an instructor at Jeonbuk Driving School, which Ms. Cha once attended. “It felt like a huge burden falling off our back. We didn’t have the guts to tell her to quit because she kept showing up.”

WHEN word began spreading last year of the woman who was still taking the test after failing it more than 700 times, reporters traced her to Sinchon, where the bus, the only means of public transportation, comes by once every two hours on a street so narrow it has to pull over to let other vehicles pass.

They followed her to the test site in the city of Jeonju, an hour away. There, they also videotaped her in the market, where she sells her home-grown vegetables at an open-air stall.

Once she finally got her license, in May, Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group, South Korea’s leading carmaker, started an online campaign asking people to post messages of congratulations. Thousands poured in. In early August, Hyundai presented Ms. Cha with a $16,800 car.

This gives a whole new meaning to the old saying that if at first you don’t succeed you try, try again.