People hate the DOL for a reason

Readers outside Washington State should substitute “DMV” for “DOL”, and then things will make much more sense.

Today I woke up and realized that school starts in a little over a week, at which point my roommate returns and I no longer have unlimited access to his car. On the tails of this realization came another: I still don’t have any means of proving my age or identity, my glasses are held together with medical tape, and if I want to go to Mexico for Christmas with the fam, I’d better get a passport by then. Accordingly, I decided to take a “personal day” from work and correct as many of those problems as I could. For older readers, a “personal day” is just like a “sick day”, except that you don’t have to lie about being sick.

I actually went to Schmitz hall and replaced my Husky Card before driving to the DOL in Greenwood, which was easy enough. I was going to just stand in line with all the freshmen getting their cards for the first time and hope the help desk wouldn’t notice the difference and therefore neglect to charge me for the replacement, but no such luck. They’re all computerized in there these days. They even had my previous photo on file; the clerk said “the Unabomber look is kind of cute.” I got a new one.

Getting my license replaced wasn’t so tough either, but there was definitely more waiting involved. You know the drill: everyone is assigned a number upon entrance, and glowing LED displays above each clerk indicate which number they are currently serving. This means that instead of lines for each window, there’s a vast sea of chairs from which people rise at random to be served every time an LED display changes with a soft “bong”. Also, each “bong” is accompanied by an ethereal female voice broadcast over the PA saying, for example, “Now serving number seven… zero… five… at window three.” It’s kind of like what I imagine customer service announcements in the convenience store on the Enterprise sound like. The net effect of the process is to give one a vast and overarching feeling of helplessness, a guttural assurance that, no matter what your actions, the course of your life is controlled entirely by forces you can neither see nor understand.

“Bong”. The girl to my right rises and is served. Her number is 410.

“Bong”. A man across the room gets up and goes to the window next to her. The display above him reads, “167″.

I whimper fecklessly. My number is 433.

This must be what a totalitarian society is like. I eventually got my replacement license – luckily they accepted my 16-year-old expired license as ID – and got the hell out of there. On the way out I overheard a clerk talking with someone, telling him that Tuesday and Saturday were the busy days. I knew about Saturday, I mean, duh, but Tuesday? Shouldn’t this information be on their website somewhere? I’m just glad I don’t have to buy groceries this way.