There's no ASAP at the DMV

Sunday…
As fate would have it, Mitchell’s 16th birthday happened to land on a Sunday. A Sunday! This is no good, especially for a teenage boy who’d rather be celebrating his momentous milestone by getting his license and not by sitting on a hard church pew contemplating hellfire and damnation.

Monday…
Bright and early, Mitchell and I arrive down at the Department of Motor Vehicles and are happy to find that we we're the first to arrive in the parking lot, ahhhh! No waiting in line! We park the car, skip excitedly to the door, and…it’s locked! What? How can this be? Mitchell had just waited 24 torturous hours with all the feigned patience and determination of a man on death row awaiting an 11th-hour pardon, only to find the door to his future would remain locked tight! Freedom denied! The sign read: “Mondays-Closed”. The DMV’s four-day workweek had shattered all hope. His car, like his dreams, would sit idle. Someone in President Obama’s administration should be alerted to the fact that the business hours of this particular branch of government has turned the campaigned promise of “HOPE” to “Nope”. Apparently “Yes We Can” only operates from 9-5pm Tuesday through Friday.

Tuesday…
Tuesday's tale is what your math teacher would call “a story problem”. Feel free to use the "new math" from my previous blog to see if you can solve it: The DMV stipulates that if you’re taking a written test you must be in line AND have your number called no less than one hour before closing, “No Exceptions”. Okay, so let’s do the math…hmmm…this means we can’t be called any later than 4pm and the line, if of average length, could take about 30 minutes should two service windows be hypothetically open and the lobby had less than say, five people in it. That means we’ve got to arrive no later than 3:30pm, but we must allow for the fact that school gets out at 3:45pm, 15 minutes past our time, plus it takes 10 minutes to pick him up and drive there at speeds no greater than 35mph (are you keeping up? I’m now reaching for my scientific calculator) therefore, we discover the total sum will require me to nab Mitchell out of the last bit of school and pick him up at about 3:20pm right? Wrong! Silly me, I forgot to factor in that it takes an additional 10 minutes to actually fill out the school’s paper work explaining why I am willfully retarding my son's education by taking him out of school mischievously early. So by the time I pen my way through the school's official forms declaring myself a derelict parent, you guessed it, we arrived 10 minutes too late to WAIT FOR for a test on Tuesday.

Wednesday…
Things are looking up. It’s “early out” at the high school and we’re ready to shake off the bad DMV vibes and try it again! This time, with the coordinated effort rivaling the tactics of General MacArthur, we set our watches, mapped our route into enemy territory, and set a rendezvous place and time to begin our DMV invasion. Like clockwork, everything went off as planned! We arrived 1 hour and 32 minutes before closing, took our number…and waited. Looking back, I should have been a little alarmed that the parking lot was packed full of cars, as was the waiting area, but I took comfort in the fact that there were three windows open and the line was moving right along. This could be our day! No sooner did we take our seats, the lady behind window #1 finishes up with her customer, shuts her window, and starts counting the money in her till! An hour-and-a-half before closing! She then turns and disappears behind a mysterious door where I assume secret closing rituals take place that must take precisely an hour and a half to orchestrate an official DMV shutdown. Now we were down to two open windows! I looked at Mitchell with widened eyes, and started fidgeting. “We’re gonna make it,” I reassured him timidly. Four minutes later the lady behind window #3 finishes with her customer and instead of calling the next number, she bends down and reaches for something…what could it be? Hurry lady…get your shoe-lace tied or pick up your dropped pen, or whatever it is and call the next number! Suddenly she stands back up, looks out at the packed waiting room, and shuts her window! Incredulously, she heads out into the lobby among the impatient masses holding a giant blue recycle bin! Thinking global (obviously not local) she proceeds to gather recyclables from all the lobby trash cans! I suddenly felt sick and needed to breathe in a paper bag(I wonder if she's got one in there?). We now had 10 minutes left before the DMV went to official "nope status". While she was saving the planet, I was trying to save my son-the room was swirling for the poor boy who was seeing his hopes and dreams getting refused, reused, and recycled! Tick-tock, tick-tock…we were glued to the clock on the wall. Then, like a dagger striking at our hearts, the big hand finally lurched to 4pm, our number was never called. At 4:05pm we left the DMV parking lot empty handed…again!

Thursday…
We’ve blocked Thursday’s events from our memory. Through a series of shock treatments we could probably begin to piece the shattered moments together but I’m not sure it'd be worth it. Whatever did happen, it clearly did not include the getting of any license.

Friday…
All is lost. There is no hope, only long lines.

Saturday...Sunday...Monday…
You guessed it…closed. closed. closed.

Tuesday…
A change of tactics. The gloves are off, there’s a score to settle. The plan: skip school, skip the written test, and go strait for the actual driving part. You have to have an appointment for that, won't that force them to take us? We’ll worry about taking the written part later! We arrive for our scheduled test early and to our overwhelming joy and satisfaction Mitchell's number was finally called! Late, but it was called! This was better than winning the lottery! Off he went, keys, car, proof of insurance, and DMV official test-giver. Twenty minutes later he was back with a huge smile and had passed the driving part. Yahoo! Then, we heard these melodious words, “Since you passed the driving part, would you just like to skip through the other line and take the written part right now?” They had surrendered. Victory was in sight! Mitchell strutted off to the test area to defeat the enemy that had forced him to drive with his mother for far too long.

Happily, he passed the written part and now it’s official, he’s licensed to hit the road. We’re fully taking advantage of the fresh excitement that takes hold of every new driver by sending him on all our monotonous errands before he uncovers the truth: that they’re really not that exciting to run and that’s why we’re not doing them ourselves. We figure we’ve got another two or three months before he catches on! Anyone need something from the store? He'll do anything but run to the DMV!

(Stay tuned for the crash blog. As we learned all to well with our first teen driver, it doesn't take long before we'll be inevitably blogging that impending disaster. This time we haven't abetted the situation by throwing a nice car into the mix, poor kid, that's what you get for being born second.)