Dante’s Inferno couldn’t do justice to my hellish experience yesterday at the El Cerrito DMV. I had received a notice, because I’m over 70, that I need to renew my driver’s license, and take a written test as well as an eye exam. So I made an appointment, assuming this might expedite my having to wait in line.
I walked into the El Cerrito DMV after having had a pleasant three-mile bicycle ride on the Ohlone Bike Path and wondering whether I needed to drive a car anymore. As soon as I entered the DMV, I felt the same horror that I had experienced as a college junior entering the Rocky Butte State Prison Farm in eastern Oregon to tutor inmates in math. The teeming masses, some reeking of cigarette smoke and others just reeking, snaked in two long lines: the one of the left was for No Appointments and the one on the right for Appointments.
Grimly, I got in line, and waited 10 minutes to be told to wait in another line where I would have to file an application on one of the two dozen computers that appeared to have been auctioned off at a computer faire in the 1980s. After another wait of at least 15 minutes because the sole attendant had to deal with people coming off the computers as well as people who didn’t speak English and needed basic instructions on what to do, I was told to sit in front of a computer almost as old as me and press the white box to start the application process.
Surprisingly, the process included questions about my voting preferences: which party I prefer and where I would like my ballot sent to. Having just listened to the surveillance prowess on Peter Thiel’s Palantir software on NPR, I was shocked by this inquiry into my voting preferences. This felt as if it were 1984 all over again.
Next, I waited in line to get an identification code on my application form from the same sole attendant. I asked her why she didn’t have help and she said her co-staffer was on lunch break, which seemed to have extended into the cocktail hour.
Then I was told to I would have to wait 30 minutes for my number to be called. I started to feel as if I’d been waterboarded by false promises of oxygen after repeated dunkings into wait lines. I had to sit in a plastic chair sans back support – from an office furniture auction from the 50s? – next to a woman who stepped out from time to time to get a smoke. I gave up watching the clock or even looking at the screen that announced future numbers. This is what severe depression must feel like, I thought.
Finally, I was sent to Window 5, where a cheerful person informed me I couldn’t get the special ID card for air travel without a passport, birth certificate, or social security card. Of course, I had brought none of these.
“How about a regular driver’s license?”
“Yes, but you have to pay $35 first. And we don’t take credit cards.”
They do take debit cards, and this worked.
I have until 2020 to get a special ID license for travel. I might not live that long if I have to repeat this experience, I mused.
Next, I had to take an eye exam. I just had cataract surgery in one eye – I was myopic in both eyes – and had a long distance lens inserted in that eye. Now I have monovision, which means I can see both long distance and close distance. But wait! This apparently requires a special optometry report despite my ability to see long distance in one eye, which is all that the California driver’s code requires. So now I can’t get a permanent license until I return with an optometrist’s report.
Oh yes, I had to wait in yet the same line as the application line to take the driver’s exam. The co-worker who had gone to lunch at 1:30, when I had arrived, was still out to lunch at 3:30. DMV has great staff benefits apparently.
This time, my vintage computer wouldn’t recognize my thumbprint (another 1984 biomarker) no matter how many times I tried, so after waiting in line again, I got a paper test with a pencil. I took the test, waited in line, passed the test and escaped.
But as I was leaving – after 2 and a half hours in this drivers’ Ellis Island – a buxom staff person walked around the room bellowing a warning: “For everyone without an appointment, the wait will be 4 hours and 40 minutes.” This was at 4 p.m. PST.
If there’s an argument for updating the DMV, this is it. Silicon Valley technologists: Come to the rescue.