Driving in Our Car

Having never been able to drive, I've never taken an interest in cars. But since I'm planning to take the driving test soon, I just wanted to make sure that our car is in an OK condition for the test. The car, a 1999 Toyota Camry, has, since the first day we got it, always shown on the instrument panel that something's wrong with the rear lights. We've checked it and all the rear lights work, so we put it down to a quirk of an old car.
But it dawned on me about two days ago that we've never really checked the "high mounted stop light", the superfluous thing that lights up on the rear board, that sits between the speakers in our car. In fact when I got Edna to go out and look again yesterday, she missed the light completely and it was only after I pointed it out physically that we learnt that the light doesn't work. So we've been driving without a "high mounted stop light". And so have many drivers given that I can't help but notice whether that light lights up whenever we hit a red light now. (Another Bono Moment whole thing is interesting but 4.25 for song itself).
So, my penchant for taking things apart kicked in. After all, how hard could it be to check a light bulb after years of taken electrical and electronic things apart and (almost) perfectly putting them back together again. So, with the handy 1999 Toyota Camry manual in hand, I peered into the fuse box (fuse was ok) and dismantled the rear light (bulb and contact points seem ok). I was really tempted to dig into the wiring to see if I could do anything but decided that this was no Tamiya / Airfix model kit.
Better to bring in for the pros to figure it out.