THE DMV MADE SIMPLE

I was ready to jump thru hoops and bring medication for anti depressants as I stood in line at 7:30 AM outside the DMV office in Laguna Hills…Would I be another of their victims?

Already a line of a hundred people in front of me and the place wasn’t even open yet…and not a smiling face in the bunch…I fit in well with these grumpy people…

By 9:00 a.m. I made it inside to the ‘start-here’ counter where the semi-smiling clerk attached a sticker with # G-050 to my license renewal letter (dated renew on or before April 3, 2009) and told me to wait for my number to be called…meanwhile the line inside and outside the place kept on getting longer and longer…there probably was over 200 people already standing and sitting around…my number was marked with a G as a voice on a TV screen called out the next number…I heard B’s, C’s and D’s called before the G’s started… I went there expecting to wait for hours and they didn’t disappoint…

My number was called around 10:30…

I was over a year late in renewing... having had detached retina surgery late in 2008 and then cataract surgery a few months before my license was due for renewal I could not think of getting renewed if I couldn’t pass the vision test… I had double vision and could not drive…I spent almost all of 2009 going to eye experts trying to find a fix…none was ever found even tho my double vision gradually lessened each month…a month ago I got new glasses and I was determined to make them work for me…many early mornings I woke up thinking I was going to the DMV and had to try to explain why I was a year late in renewing…but I chickened out not wanting to fail the tests…should I have brought along letters from my Eye-Docs or what? I took sample on-line tests and read the book over and over again…I thought I was ready…

I heard: “G-050, go to window 14”……When I got to window 14 the nice lady was smiling as she looked over my overdue notice…but she never said a word about my being a year late…she took my $32 and had me sign and verify some new forms…she asked me to read lines of letters from the vision chart above her head, which I surprisingly did easily, then she told me to go to window 22, the last window, stand in line, get photo’d, fingerprinted and take a written test…I wrote out the multiple choice answers to 25 questions and took it back to desk 22, dropped it in a basket, went to the restroom and then waited for my name to be called…another nice lady called out my name…in seconds I was standing there in front of her…she congratulated me for getting a 100% correct score and said I was the first of the day…yippee for me…after 4 and a half hours I went out to my car and drove home as a licensed very happy smiling guy…it was a piece o' cake!