Adventures at the DMV

Three years ago, my parents bought a car. It was officially my dad's car, but because his job takes him out of the country for extended periods of time, it became technically my car.

For reasons unknown to me, I was deemed responsible enough to take the car with me to college (a four hour drive from my parents' house) and keep it for my sophomore, junior and senior years at school. Even further not understandable, they signed it over to my name, so I now officially own a car.

All that I had to do was take the title to the government car-registering place (commonly known as the DMV), sign a few papers, and tell them it was mine.

I went to the bank because I swear the government charges you for everything, even breathing. You can't even set foot in one of their offices without someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying "Excuse me, but you got dirt on the entry rug, which is the property of the government. That will be one hundred dollars and your firstborn child please."

Once you're in the DMV office, (in my town at least) you go to the desk which is at the end of a long waiting-line area, tell the person at the desk who responds in robot-tones what it is that you hope to accomplish in this building of dream-crushing, and he takes your license, prints off a number, gives you back your license and the number, and tells you to go sit down and wait.

So you go sit down in the rows and rows of chairs with the other obedient government mind-slaves who have been conditioned to bow to the need to wait in line without blinking an eye.

First order of business was to get my new address on my license. That was relatively easy. I gave it to the grandfatherly old man who typed it out, had me sign five separate documents, three of which I'm pretty sure I signed the last time I had to venture to this place, forked over ten dollars, and then smiled for the always-awful drivers license photo. It must be a law that all photos taken for identification must make you look like a sleep-deprived soul-sucker. One of these days I'll remember to put on makeup for those pictures and then I'll look like a pretty sleep-deprived soul-sucker.

After I got the easy part sorted out, I had to go to another office that I didn't even know existed until the robot at the desk told me to go to one of two locations that were nowhere near where I was. By consulting the ever-useful Google maps, I found that one was easy to get to and I knew the street, while the other was down some back country road and looked like an abandoned and dilapidated general store/moonshine distillery. I wasn't about to risk getting caught in the backwoods, so I chose the one that turned out to be very well-hidden in a shopping center.

To get there, you turn at the sign for what has been optimistically termed a "mall" and is instead a collection of chain stores and shops (including a biological testing lab, which is not at all disturbing to see next to an Office Depot). Then you drive all around the parking lot, looking for anything that resembles an official looking doorway, but such a thing does not exist. Instead, you have to consult the map to find that the office is hidden through an unobtrusive and unlabeled doorway, up an escalator, and down a hallway.

This is the mall. It is an eerily abandoned building that is creepy at day and would be terrifying at night. Out of the twenty areas that there are for stores, about five are occupied. A tax agency that wasn't open, a cosmetology school, the DMV tag office, and two others that I had never heard of and didn't feel brave enough to venture in and identify. Nobody is there except for DMV line and three people working in the school. All it needed was flickering lights and scratchy plinky music playing over the PA system, for me to write it off as the scene of ghost infestations and murders and then taken my chances with the moonshine distillery.

I got in line behind a group of depressed soul-sucked people and an almost-creepy friendly person who randomly started talking to people, was dressed in really dirty painter's clothes, and said his name was "Boogie". He answered his phone with "This is Boog" and bounced everywhere while he talked like a cross between a kangaroo and a bobble-head.

After Boogie got his business taken care of in front of me, it was my turn to be told that I was in the wrong line and that I had to go stand behind the line of old men who all told me that they would have their next birthday here. I laughed politely and hoped for a nice DMV person to help me because I had no idea what I was doing. There was also someone behind the desk who looked like a Vogon and I desperately did not want have her. Vogons should not work at the DMV.

Fortunately I did not get the Vogon lady, and instead found myself handing my paperwork to a sour-looking female who frowned even deeper and informed me that my forms were filled out wrong. At first, it sounded like my parents had signed their forms wrong, which sent me into a near-crying panic because I live four hours from home and my dad had left the week before to fly halfway around the world and when he does that, you never know when he'll be back. There's no way you can get a man to sign something when he's more than five time zones ahead of you. I made that lady explain it to me three times before I understood that all she needed was my signature and then I was sent away.

I was told that I needed to go back, sign a few more things, put the mileage of my car on forms that I hadn't seen yet, and then I could try again. That being done, I went to stand back in line in the ghosty murder mall, went back to the same sour-faced lady, who took my money and made me sign so many forms that may or may not have related to getting a vehicle put in my name.

She then pulled a license plate out of nowhere, handed me a few more pieces of paper and told me that I owned a car.

I took that car to buy groceries as a celebration.