too many words by laura lemay

easy peasy

I had to go to the DMV on monday to renew my driver’s license. This was good because my current driver’s license was taken during a short period of time in the late 90’s when I looked like a normal adult (glasses, BROWN HAIR AIIIEEEE) and its kind of hard to explain these days (Nice Policeman: “you look…different.” Homeland Security: “are you sure this is you? Please step this way.”)

I had taken off most of the afternoon for this excursion. My normal DMV strategy is to bring a good book and just go stand in line for a couple hours. Just get it over with. Sometimes you meet interesting people. But to actually reduce the pain this time and because for once I did not procrastinate until the very last second I figured I would make an appointment.

The California DMV actually lets you make appointments on the web{.broken_link} these days. Its not even a pain in the ass. They’ll give you the soonest appointment they have, or you can try to choose one. I picked soonest available, which was only two weeks away.

Once I showed up at the DMV things were….different. There were no long lines. What the…? They’d changed to some sort of numbering system. I got in the line marked “appointments” and the nice woman game me my number. Then I went and sat down in the big row of chairs in the lobby. Chairs! You can sit down at the DMV! Big TV screens above the counters showed what number they were on, just like at the deli.

I had barely sat down when they called my number. I didn’t even get a chance to crack my book. The woman at the counter was nice to me. I was in and out of there in ten minutes, and I had the rest of the afternoon to kill in wonderment of it all. I went to the DMV and it totally didn’t suck!

They still took a completely crapass picture of me (they didn’t fix everything), but at least my hair color matches now.