DMV Vignettes

Everyone has a horrible DC DMV story. I am not going to share all the obscene details of what my friend, Ruthie, and I went through yesterday during our trip there.

That would be the equivalent of swapping stories about a bike commute in DC on one of the rare days there is snow and ice—no words can possibly describe how bad DC drivers are in ice/snow, how little they respect cyclists, or how terrifying it is to try to maintain your bicycle upright and out of traffic, while still riding on the right hand side of the street, where the snow is treated and plowed the least. The DC government does not plow bike lanes.

I only want to share two vignettes.

Vignette 1
I finally made it through three different lines to talk to the DMV employee granted the power to process the renewal of my driver’s license. I asked this exalted individual why my DLN was not recognized by the DC DMV online system—a technical glitch that had forced me to spend several hours of yesterday’s perfect late summer day in a state of sullen boredom. The DMV employee paused in her rant about how she was too smart for her job—delivered to an unseen but doubtless sympathetic cubemate—blinked at me behind watery goggle-glasses, and bellowed, “Oh I don’t know nothing about no online system. You have to talk to a DMV employee about that.”
I startled at her—body language totally lost on the DMV employee, who already was re-complaining to her invisible cubemate that no one recognized her many talents, including how well she treated the customers.

After a few minutes, I again interrupted her soliloquy to ask her how I should go about finding a DMV employee who could help me. Her response: “I don’t know nothing about no DMV employees. We all work for the DMV. You want to learn about the online system, you have to call 311.” I blinked, mentally probed this statement to see if there were any way to extract logical or helpful directions from it, and decided to bite my tongue.

Vignette 2
Ruthie and I were finally triumphant, all necessary documents in hand. Almost: they had entered in Ruthie’s height erroneously on her license and we were standing where we had been told to stand while the error was corrected.

A new, authoritative woman suddenly materialized around the corner, screaming at everyone that wasn’t already doing so to sit in a chair. This involved separating parents from their young children; it also involved admitting that there weren’t enough chairs. Once we were all seated or corralled in some manner that was minimally acceptable, this Supreme Harpy of the DMV screamed at us to show proof—a DMV wait number—of our legitimate right to occupy the chairs into which we had just been forced. Most people obediently held up their numbers; Ruthie and I couldn’t, since our numbers had been taken when our new licenses were processed. We tried to explain this to the Supreme Harpy, but to no avail. Finally, she admitted that Ruthie had a right to remain in her chair, but I did not and I was ignominiously ejected. As I retreated in the Supreme Harpy’s wake, I heard her complain in a loud mutter, “I swear, it is the same every day. People always come up in here. Every single day there are people that come up in this office.”

Any commentary I could provide on that statement would diminish it.