Life at the DMV

Tomorrow is my birthday and in Texas, your driver's license expires on your birthday. This was my year for renewal. There were lots of plans for going earlier in the summer and even earlier in the week, but my busy summer, my admitted laziness and tropical storm Edoard conspired and I had to go today.

And here's the thing. Everyone has to go to the DMV. It's one of those rare places where you get a real, true cross-section of America--rich, poor, white, brown, black, old, young, beauty and the beast--we're all sitting and standing together in one line (or many lines) at the DMV. You can't pay someone else to do it for you; you have to invest the time yourself.

And time it is...all the old cliches are true. The Texas Department of Public Safety has an incredibly inefficient system. I'm just gonna point out some issues I observed.

• The stated open time is 8 am. The posted time on the door is 8 am. So, I arrived at 7:45. They actually open at 7:30, so by the time I got there, there was a quadruple double-backed line. This was the line for the information desk...the person who was the gatekeeper for all things DMV-like. Everyone had to stand in this line. It took 45 minutes to get to the information desk. Several people in front of me didn't have the correct forms or ID, so they waited those 45 minutes for nothing. It seems unbelievably cruel to make someone wait that long only to tell them that you can't help them.

• They understaff early in the morning. One area only had one person working from 7:30 to 8 am, and then two from 8 to 8:30. From 8:30 on, they had four, and things finally started to move. I decided that the point was to set up a backlog from the very beginning. Because otherwise, you would staff with more people to handle the morning rush (especially on a Friday, which is bound to be a busy day...with the extra expiration dates of Saturday & Sunday tripling the number of people who HAVE to go on Friday).

• After you arrived at the information desk and your preliminary paperwork was checked (along with your eyesight), you were given a short form and a number. You could then go sit down and wait for your number to be called. When it was (30 more minutes), you then could go stand in one final line to be called up to the person who could actually process your renewal (15 more minutes). At the information desk, we were handed a "wait time" survey, so that they could see how long everyone was waiting. The idiotic thing about this survey is that it is completely inaccurate, as they are missing the first 45 minutes I stood in line, waiting to even get into the system.

• In business school, we learned about a deliberate business strategy similar to what I think is the accidental system at the DMV. The idea is that if you break someone's wait up into several discrete steps, people will be so excited about some movement they won't realize the length of the whole wait (you see this a lot at amusement parks when they have you move through different sections). I never thought this was effective and I guarantee it didn't work for me.

• On my renewal form, I was asked if I wanted to donate $1 to blindness education (sure) and $1 to organ donor awareness (absolutely), but no where was I asked if I wanted to be an organ donor. This, like many people who have loved ones in their lives who have benefited from organ transplants, is an important issue to me. So, I asked. They had information in Spanish (nothing in English), but all I needed was the sticker off the bottom...they also had a form to fill out to be part of a state-wide database. This I happily filled out, but I wish they'd be more pro-active about the whole thing.

All in all, it was an interesting sociological event that I hope I don't have to repeat all that often. And that my picture turns out halfway decent.

Later on in the day, as I was taking the kids bowling, we drove past and the line was even longer than at 7:45 am. So, I think the decision to go early was a good one.