Deep down I knew I wouldn’t get far trying to lie my way through the DMV, but I did think I’d get past the door.
In June, at the prospect of studios reopening amid a health crisis, and three months ahead of my personal schedule of goals, I bought a car. Technically it’s a lease, but it’s mine and it’s brand new and it’s the first car I’ve had since I sold my old Corolla to my parents and moved to Boston in 2011. I spent nine years as a pedestrian in two cities with terrible transit, one with more sidewalks than the other.
I walked into the dealership and told them exactly which car I wanted and then I bought a different one, although it was mostly the same, just a smaller model. Who am I driving around, really?
“I have a question, though,” I said to the salesman, Terrell, who insisted I call him T, before we traipsed back out in the sun, both of us sweating through our masks. “I have a Massachusetts license and the DMV is closed, so is that a problem?”
“Oh,” T said, his mask slipping down his nose. “I guess you can’t get a car.”
“Oh,” I said, shrinking back toward my roommate’s car that I had borrowed yet again.
“I’m joking,” T said, genuinely worried at my gullibility. “It’s fine. As long as you have a license at all.”
If you freeze-frame this, just know I had every intention of switching things over in the days before this moment. I even had my mom send me a screenshot of my birth certificate so I could start an online account with the DMV and get the ball rolling for when they allowed me to visit once again.
My base flaw, worse than my impatience or my utter incapacity to reason with electronics, is that I always think I’m right. In my defense, I am usually right, so it’s a difficult beast to tame.
Deep down I think I remembered my license expires on my birthday this year, but maybe I was sure things would be more normal earlier on in the timeline of this insanity. Anyway, my birthday is in less than two weeks and I have no idea what reminded me of any of this when I bolted out of an Instagram haze and fell into thirty minutes of panic.
I went back into the account I started with the DMV, only to find it had been erased since the website had updated in the meantime, and in that time they had also opened in-person appointments. I booked one. For today.
There are two lines at the DMV in Los Angeles, one for people who made appointments, and one for the plebes who take their chances of standing in line. The roll-the-dice line is always wrapped around the building. I drive by this office every day and never have I ever seen a line that doesn’t reach the street behind the back wall. The lines go in opposite directions and there are two employees heading the front doors, one at the front of each line. So when the lady in front of the opposite line starting yelling at me, I was very confused.
“YOU, next in line, I’m talking to YOU.”
“Me?” I pointed at myself like I was on a Jumbo-Tron and not being scolded in public at the hellscape of all locales.
“You,” she loudly complained as I made my way over, across the signage, and now standing directly in front of the long line of people clamoring to be where I wished I wasn’t. “What did you think I was doing, yelling for you? Just not paying any attention.”
She wasn’t letting this go and I tried to make eye contact with the only other person heralding the entrance, hoping he’d intervene on my behalf. He was wearing a Lakers mask, and I love basketball, maybe he could sense that from where I stared at him underneath my hooded sweatshirt. Probably this seemed more menacing than I meant.
“I thought you were for this other line,” I said, but I said it like it was an obvious thing.
“Do you have an appointment,” she asked, even though I came from the appointment line, and this too seemed like an obvious thing.
“Yes, it’s this number,” I pointed to a handwritten digit sequence in my paper planner because I am an ancient kind of person, but she didn’t even look at it.
“What time is your appointment for?”
“Ten.”
“TEN?”
I felt shamed but it was 9:52AM so I’m not sure what time I was supposed to arrive.
“Do you have all your documents,” she asked, and this is where I should have come prepared with running shoes or coffee, so I could have made a break for the inside.
“Yes?”
“What do you have?”
“I have proof of address, a social security card…” I trailed off, hoping for the best.
“Do you have a birth certificate or a passport?”
Back in June, when I was gathering things preemptively, I grabbed my passport with a vague sense of dread, flipping it open with a more acute sense of dread. It expired in 2019. The passport renewal process through COVID has been one I wanted to avoid, so I did, and promptly forgot about it until two weeks ago when I made this DMV appointment. I was hoping that since literally no one will talk to me on the phone, if I just showed up in person I could get some answers about what to do when you move out of state and the birth certificate office can’t mail you anything because they’re closed, and the passport renewals are running a literal six months behind, and maybe there are some COVID-friendly exceptions because maybe someone has some humanity or at least more patience than I do with this god-forsaken website.
“So…”
“So, you have none of the things you’re supposed to have. There’s nothing we can do for you at this appointment. You’re telling me you couldn’t find the information on the website and I’m telling you it’s all there and you just didn’t look at it.”
“I just want to talk to someone to find out what to do when the records office says it’s four months to order a copy and the passport office says six months.”
“It’s not the city of LA’s fault you didn’t do this in time. LA is more populous than Indiana and we figured out our backlog and you’re trying to tell me Indiana is still shut down from COVID when we are fine now.”
“I’m not here to argue with you about the disparity between states,” I said, at the front of a line of people taking a risk to wait in the rain on a Monday morning just to have a similar conversation with this gatekeeper. Maybe not the hallmark of smooth operations.
I have worked in customer service for most of my life and I know that generally, people are assholes. The guy three people behind me at that very moment was refusing to put his mask on to talk to an employee.
“Oh, well, maybe I have a germ somewhere in my coat that might come out or something,” he said, flailing his arms in a circle as he made a big show of not knowing which side of the mask was the top.
It was now 9:54AM and I’m sure I wasn’t the first problem child in the line. I also know it was kind of my own fault. I know I think I’m right, and bear with me, but here’s one more time: Not everyone should be in customer service. Because most people are assholes and if you come into with that as your frame of reference, then ALL people will be assholes. Including me.
She handed me a piece of paper that listed all the same information as the website, which of course were all the obvious things. What I wanted was for someone to talk me through my next steps in a way that seemed possible, not berating me in front of the building like I brought a dead rat to the door instead of an old passport.
I sat in my car and called to make another appointment, hoping my birth certificate would arrive by the time I could get there again, but no one answered. I think deep down I knew I belonged in the gambler’s line to begin with.