After a Night of Unquiet Dreams

     Well, I wasn't metamorphosed like Gregor Samsa into a gigantic bug, contrary to what the occasional interlocutor here and elsewhere might believe.  But I have had a couple of days that bear out what George Will recently had to say, on how the proliferation of laws and the dearth of common sense and common responsibility rob us of our freedom, or at least make life like wandering about in a German bureaucracy.

     My father-in-law gave my daughter a used car for her graduation.  She wasn't able to drive it right away, being hampered by her inability to drive any car at all, so we never put plates on it.  It's been sitting up on the north forty -- on the other side of our garage, up the road from our house.  But since she now has a License to Drive, Mrs. E and I decided it would be a grand thing to get the car straightened out with the state apparatchiks, and wrap the license plates up for Christmas.  Such dreamers we were.

     So I go to the local DMV office.  It is almost the only thing open in an enormous two-story indoor shopping mall; over 95% of the space is empty, but that I guess is another story.  I take my number and wait.  It's snowing outside, and accumulating.  I start to calculate the amount of time I'll have to wait, given how long I've waited already and how many numbers I have left to pass.  People start to leave, afraid they won't make it home before the roads get nasty.  When I go up to the counter at last, the lady there asks me if I have a bill of sale for the car.

     "No sale," I say.  "The car was a present for my daughter.  It was for her gradu--"

     "Then we need a letter signed and notarized stating that it was a gift."

     "But see," I say, "here is a letter, and here is the title, and it's notarized, and you see he's signed over the car to--"

     "Sir, I am not going to look at any of that material."

     "But the title says --"

     "I am not going to look at it.  You will also need a VIN Check, to make sure that the car was not stolen."  A VIN, in case you don't know, is a Vehicle Identification Number, sort of like the social security numbers that are tattooed to our buttocks at birth.  The VIN is to be located somewhere on the body of the car, inside the front door on the driver's side, usually.  "Besides, we don't give out plates at this office."  So home I go.

     The letter has to be procured from Grandpa, and for all practical purposes it means that we'll wait tll after our visit at Christmas.  So we do, and we come back, with said letter (composed by me, and duly signed and notarized, requiring a trip by Grandpa to the notary).  Meanwhile I call the police about the VIN check, and learn what the lady at the DMV had not bothered to tell me, that I could not get plates without proof of insurance.  I also learn that the VIN checks are only done on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, from 10 AM to 2 PM, and from 5 PM to 8 PM.  Unfortunately I neglected to write down those days.  Will the police come to the house to check the VIN?  No, they will not.  But what if I have no plates?  Will it be all right for me to drive the car the mile to the police station?  No, it will not.  What do I do then?  I will have to procure temporary plates.  Where do I get those?  The police do not know.  They suppose it will be at the local DMV.  "Why don't you check their website?"  I check.  The website will not answer.  I call the DMV; never an easy task, and learn that the nearest place I can get a temporary plate is at the main DMV office.

     I make the necessary alterations in the insurance policy, then proceed to the state DMV, located in Pawtucket, a city that used to boast quite a lot of industry -- the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, they call it, with some justification.  Now it is a tangle of one-way streets over bridges and Interstate 95, with a lot of empty buildings and decaying neighborhoods.  Since 95 was one of the first interstate highways to be built, urban planners had not yet learned what a highway put straight through the heart of a town can do to it -- or maybe they had, but no one cared.  Rhode Island legend, which usually understates things in a dour New England sort of way, has it that the treacherous S-curves which provide such excitement for many thousands of drivers every week are the result of collusion: some mob boss, or some politician (they often amounted to much the same thing) owned a few scattered properties in Providence and Pawtucket, and arranged it so that the road would go through them all, allowing him to unload them at the charge of the government.  His astuteness is duly memorialized on the concrete medians bounding the curves, in the form of variously colored streaks of paint from automobiles.  In any case, Pawtucket lobbied hard for the privilege of hosting the DMV, hoping that it would bring in a lot of people who would otherwise never enter the city.  They were certainly right about that.  Whether such people would then remain in Pawtucket to spend money after their outing at the DMV is another matter.

     Pawtucket thus asked the state to put a sign on the Interstate: DMV, Exit 28.  Unfortunately, when the unsuspecting motorist leaves the highway at said exit, he finds himself in a knot of intersections, without a sign directing him which way to go.  That was probably by design.  It might lead many a motorist -- it certainly led me, as I drove round the one-way streets and crossed and recrossed many a bridge -- to stop in a gas station and spend money, if only to ask directions.  Which I did, and got, and found that the DMV was located in a large abandoned department store building, which I had passed three times.  The building has a huge sign atop it, reading "Apex," the name of the store that used to be there.  But no roadside sign alerting anyone to the presence of the DMV.  No parking lot sign, either.

     When you enter the DMV building, you see lines everywhere, and no clear way of knowing which line you should be in.  One long line leads to a booth labeled "Information."  I jump ahead of somebody in the "Title" line and ask, "Am I supposed to be in the Information line if I'm here for temporary plates?"  "Oh yes," is the answer.  I stand in the Information line, then, for about half an hour; the line, I'm told, is usually much longer.  I take a number, and find that there are about 130 people ahead of me for plates.  I sit down and try to read.

     That isn't as easy as it used to be.  It's worse in a doctor's office, as I experienced the following day, but still it's hard to think when you are trying to keep track of the numbers being called out, particularly when the numbers do not follow strict numerical order, jumping from 999 to 700.  A couple of strikingly foul-mouthed lawyers were sitting behind me, talking in a flippant way about some murder case; those ladies didn't help either.  Finally I do get the temporary plates, out $11.50 and half a day, learning that the letter of gift wasn't necessary after all.  The kind woman at the booth gives me a pass, good for two days, for jumping to the head of the line, in case I make it back to get the real plates.

     Now back home, with the temps bolted on and raring to go, I try to start the car.  It started in the summer, but won't start now.  I jump start it, let it idle for twenty minutes or so, then drive down to the police station, forgetting that it is Monday.  As soon as I pull up to the station, the car stalls -- the battery is still dead.  I enter the station.  It's no big city I live in, but apparently we have our share of crime, so that you cannot talk to the policemen without stating your business through an intercom first.  Which I do, and "click" goes the electronic lock on the door, like something out of Get Smart.  I go in, and say I'm there for a VIN check, and unfortunately the car won't start, so I could use a jump, too.

     "We don't do VIN checks on Mondays," the officer says.  There are three of them in the office, two men and one woman.  Nobody else is around.  The lady comes out to smile at me.  "We can't jump start your car, either.  But we can call AAA for you."  They do, and I stand outside waiting for the tow truck.  It's 25 degrees out.

     The man shows up, looks over at the police station, tossing his head.  "They wouldn't help you, would they?"  No, I say.  One of the cops had told me that they weren't allowed to, because they would be held liable in case they did any damage to the car.  Pretty absurd.  But the trucker wasn't persuaded.  "They could do it if they wanted to.  I fight with them all the time.  They don't want to come out here because it's cold.  They have one of these, too."  He got out the portable battery charger.  It took him a while to start it; in fact, I actually had to go back into the station to have the cops call him back.  So I was out another $30.  When I drive it home I leave it running for over an hour, but the battery still will not hold a charge.  So I will have to buy a battery for it so that I can drive it tomorrow to the police station so that they can read the VIN so that I can go to Pawtucket to buy plates.

     I would have done it today, but I had to take Mrs. E for an appointment at the dermatologist's.  Nothing serious; we were a bit concerned about a certain spot, but it turns out it's nothing.  The doctor, a kindly old man, told her that he was required to call a nurse in, did she mind?  Because the spot was in a private area, and -- you know, lawsuits and all that. 

     When people say that their vices are their own, all I can say is, thank you, no.  Our vices now make a common life really difficult.  The local playground at Grandpa's house is now fenced and bolted shut.  That too is another story.

Comments

[Nick Milne]

I was bemused and sympathetic while reading this until:

A couple of strikingly foul-mouthed lawyers were sitting behind me, talking in a flippant way about some murder case; those ladies didn't help either.

It was then that the sadness came over me and a world already grey became slightly darker. Such things we put up with! It's almost too much to bear. I'm not usually such a sad sack, and I don't know why this affected me as much as it did, but, well... it did.

What wretched sludge it is that now clings to the diamond God once called good.

[Sandra Miesel]

My daughter had far less trouble getting papers and plates for the car we gave her. But in Tennessee she could count on Southern courtesy towards a lady in distress.

But allow me to buff my nails over the smoothness of current practices at the Indiana BMV.

[maria horvath]

Tony,

Check with AAA to see if they still offer their battery service. Last year one of their kind drivers came to our house, diagnosed the state of our battery (almost dead, alas), and sold us a new one to replace the old.

Maria

[Michael D. Harmon]

This is quite what I imagine Hell to be like. Oh, there will be fire and brimstone and all that, the Bible promises it, but it will be interspersed with endless lines leading to bored clerks who (having been sent there for being bored clerks who tormented innocent linestanders) will find fault with your paperwork and send you to other (literally) endless lines.

Ad infinitum. That's why it's Hell.

[Kyle]

I'm a bored clerk. I hope I don't have to go on being a bored clerk ad infinitum.

[Tony Esolen]

Michael:

You remind me of a joke:

A bad man dies and finds himself in front of Saint Peter at the pearly gates. Peter looks through his records and says to him, "Well, I'm sorry, but it looks like you're not in. You have to go to the other place."

"Whaddya mean I have to go to the other place?" says the man. "Don't I have any choice in the matter at all?"

"As a matter of fact," says Peter, "you do have one choice. You can go to Capitalist Hell, or Socialist Hell."

"Capitalist Hell or Socialist Hell, huh? Which one would you recommend?"

"I really don't know," says Peter. "I've never been to either one, you see. Why don't you try one of them out, and if you don't like it, we can send you to the other."

"Seems fair. I'll take -- Capitalist Hell."

So the man suddenly finds himself in a great big drawing room, hundreds of feet long. There's a plush red carpet on the floor, murals on the walls, a coffered ceiling, and golden chandeliers. Way at the other end of the room there's a mahogany desk, with a clerk seated there. Other than that, the room is absolutely empty.

The man makes his way to the clerk and says, "Excuse me, but is this Capitalist Hell?"

The clerk doesn't bother to look at him. "Yes, it is."

"Well, it looks pretty nice.... What do they do to you here?"

The clerk looks up and adjusts his glasses. "We boil you in oil, we chop you into a thousand pieces, and we nail you to the wall."

"Hmm, that sounds pretty awful. I'd better try the other place."

So he does, and finds himself again at the end of a vast room. The walls are bare, and cracks are running along the plaster. The floor is bare wood. A single light bulb without a fixture is dangling from the ceiling. Way at the other end of the room a clerk is standing at a kind of lectern. The room is also packed with people, wall to wall.

The man fights his way to the other end to speak to the clerk. "Excuse me, but is this socialist Hell?"

The clerk doesn't bother to look at him. "Yes, it is."

"Well, what do they do to you here?"

The clerk looks up and adjusts his glasses. "We boil you in oil, we slice you into a thousand pieces, and then we nail you to the wall."

"But wait a second!" says the man. "That's exactly what they do to you in the other place! I don't get it!"

"Well," says the clerk, "sometimes the oil shipment doesn't come in, sometimes the power is out, sometimes ...."

[Art Deco]

The public bureaucracies in your narrative do sound similar to the Department of Motor Vehicles as I new it in Rochester 28 years ago. One elderly friend of mine put it thus: "they sit around, do their nails, talk to their friends on the phone, and smoke cigarettes." The employees (bar the younger set, not yet so habituated), were gratuitously rude. In renewing my license some years later, I found the atmosphere only mildly disagreeable. All of my subsequent visits to auto license bureaux in New York have been agreeable. The change in the institutional culture of the DMV was at the time generally attributed to the efforts of Patricia Adducci, Commissioner of Motor Vehicles from 1985 to 199?. Bad bureaucracies can be repaired. It is the job of the politicians to find folk willing and able to do it. She was no one special (for years a Democratic Party wheelhorse on Rochester's far south side, then the Monroe County Clerk, then in Gov. Cuomo's cabinet), but she did the job.

[brad evans]

If Dante could come back, he'd head straight to the RI DMV for a modern version of Purgatory. It's even got a mountain with terraces on the sides of it.

[o.h.]

My last visit to the DPS (that's what the DMV is called in Texas) was actually very pleasant, and far removed from the crowded, dingy, snide, and deliberately unhelpful place it had been a few years before on my previous visit. On-line functions had emptied the building, it has been remodeled simply but tastefully with nice paint and carpeting, and the clerks went out of their way to be helpful and friendly. I was holding a baby I couldn't put down for my photo, and the clerk at the photo booth--the last in a string of informative and smiling clerks--apologized profusely for the existence of the rule that a second person, even a baby, couldn't show up in any part in the photo, and went to some trouble to rearrange things for a closer-than-normal shot so the baby wouldn't show.

It was just surreal, really.

[Tony Esolen]

Brad, you're a Rhode Islander then! The Apex building does kind of look like Purgatory Mountain. I have to admit that the DMV is not quite as miserable a place as it used to be. They used to make you come back the next day if you didn't get seen by closing time. This time I was told that as long as I'd taken a number, I would be seen.

I did return to the DMV, by the way, and jumped the line, with my handy Jump the Line Card. Then I found out that I needed to fill out an additional "I Swear on My Mother's Grave It was a Gift" sheet. As for telling me how many days I have to get the car inspected, nobody could tell me, not at the DMV and not at the Police Station.

But it is a LOT better than it was once...

[Abigail]

My two favorite bureaucracy stories:

1) I'm trying to make an appointment for my uninsured, unemployed friend at the Dregs of Society Sliding-Scale Medical Clinic.

Receptionist: I'm sorry, we only make appointments on the same day the patients are seen, and today's appointments are all filled.

Me: So I should call back tomorrow?

Receptionist: No, tomorrow's appointments are all filled, too.

2) My daughter needed emergency medical treatment out of state. The insurance company told me, afterwards, that they only cover out-of-state treatment with pre-authorization.

Me: So there's nothing I can do?

Clerk: No, we can give you retroactive pre-authorization.

Abigail
who was glad, at least that once, to see an insurance company playing God

[brad evans]

Now if only they could put Cato at the bottom of it, at least you'd get someone interesting and of high character to talk to. Much better than the ambulance/hearse chasers you met up with.
Get Vergil and Beatrice to sit at the information desk, and you'd be all set.

[ben]

After my son Jack was born the social security card we recived for him was illegible. So we called the social security administration, and they told us to return the card by mail and they would send a new one. Well we dutifully did this and the new one never arrived, so we eventually made our way to the local SS office. We brought what we thought we would need, the birth certificate for the child, and 2 forms of parental ID.

Well, it turns out that the Social Security Administration will not accept a state-issued birthcertificate as a form of ID, even for a minor child. The clerk muttered something about how the birth certificate does not prove the child is still living and wanting to prevent illegal aliens from getting social security numbers.

But this story has a wonderful ending. After about 3 visits to the SS office with immunization records, and letters from the family Dr. trying to establish the very real existence of our young so to Uncle Sam, the document that was finally successful in passing bureaucratic muster was his baptismal certificate!

[Seth R.]

Glad I don't live out east. I've only ever lived in the intermountain west. People are more helpful here. At least, more helpful than that...

I once had a benign tumor surgically removed from my shoulder in a hospital in Japan (while a missionary). Socialized medicine... place looked like the old outdated elementary school I used to go to - with cracked tile floors and obsolete heaters against the wall. They got the tumor out alright. Then I had to wait in the reception area for pain medication. It was a long wait and the pain shots they gave me were wearing off.

Finally, I pulled the "foreigner card" and marched right up to the window and informed them rather bluntly that I had a hole in my shoulder and the pain medications were wearing off, and could they please speed it up. They did - mostly to get rid of the loud scary American I think.

I remember the doctor being shocked that I planned to ride my bike home. But then, you heal pretty quick at age 20.

[Susan Peterson]

I live in a small town in the southern tier of New York State. A visit to the DMV here is a pleasant experience. You never have to wait more than a few minutes. The clerks explain everything carefully. If you are missing documents they are apologetic and explain exactly and thoroughly what you need and how you can get it. If you don't have proof of insurance they suggest you call Marilyn-the insurance agent up the street-her number is xxx-xxxx, for proof of insurance she will fax it right to the DMV. The ladies will help the next customer while this happens and then call you over when your fax comes.

I have never heard of a VIN check and I have had a lot of gift cars and even one bought at a yard sale for $200 car. (it lasted several years.) But every state is different.

I remember the horrors of the MVA in Baltimore, and thank God for the civilities of small town life every time I go to the DMV. And I always express my gratitude to the clerks there, also. They even have testimonial letters on the wall..."Thanks for everything you did to help me get a duplicate title for my.." "Thanks for helping me figure out where I had to go to pay all my tickets so I could get my license unsuspended." (every little village around here has its own police force which gives tickets which have to be paid in their village court which meets one or two mornings or afternoons a week. Young male drivers with old cars can sometimes accumulate a combination of speeding and loud muffler and no taillight tickets, which have to be paid in four different courts on a baroque schedule, The DMV ladies will look up what tickets are on their records and know the schedules of all the village courts.)

It just goes to show that one can exercise the virtues even as a bureaucrat. As a bureaucrat myself, I try to remember this.
Susan Peterson

[YaknYeti]

A missionary to Afghanistan once told me that her hospital had to give all its employees one day off each month so they could pay their electric bills! Each bill required the signatures of (I think) 11 bureaucrats before it was officially paid.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>A missionary to Afghanistan once told me that her hospital had to give all its employees one day off each month so they could pay their electric bills! Each bill required the signatures of (I think) 11 bureaucrats before it was officially paid.<<<

In Germany, until recently (and maybe even today!), it took three different visits from three different technicians to get phone service in your home. The first technician would activate your telephone jack. The second would deliver your phone. The third would plug your phone into the wall jack. Now, maybe not everyone would be able to make the TELCO connection outside the house (though Verizon lets you do this here), but any idiot can buy a phone, and even a chimp can be trained to plug it into the wall. Yet, Germans being Germans, not only do they not complain about this system, they will not, no matter how pressing the need or inconvenient it may be to wait for the technician, plug that phone into the wall themselves.

Which is one reason why, in Germany, everybody uses cell phones and fewer and fewer people have land lines.

[Stuart Koehl]

And, from the days of the old Sovietskjiy Soyuz:

You go into the store, you look at all the goods displayed in a cabinet, pick out what you want, and tell the (surly) clerk, who fills out an invoice, which you take to a window at the back of the store, usually by joining the end of an interminable queue. Getting finally to the front of the line, you hand your invoice to another clerk who checks in the back to see if they have what you want. If, by some miracle, they do, you get another piece of paper that you take to a check-out line, where you hand over and pay your bill, and (hopefully) receive the goods for which you have just paid.

Imagine this system applied to health care. But hey, at least everybody had coverage!

[Ethan C.]

My local DMV (Jefferson City, Missouri) is a positively wonderful place. They've even got free popcorn and soda so you can snack while you wait! But then again, I do live in the state capitol, so there's a little added incentive when you might someday be serving the Big Boss. :)

Elsewhere in Missouri, all the licensing bureaus have traditionally been run by patronage recipients. Apparently, it can be a highly lucrative gig. Thanks to a scandal over the last governor's appointments, however, the new governor is doing away with all that. So despite the vast majority of the evidence, apparently it *is* possible for government services to get better!

[Brian McNulty]

Anthony - Thanks for the humorous story. It brought back many memories for me. I lived in RI for many years, am a PC grad, and my maternal grandparents lived in Pawtucket. I hadn't thought about the S-curves, one-way bridges over 95 and even the Apex store for many years. Fortunately, I left before I had to endure a DMV experience like yours.

[Christian]

Oh, my. The DMV here in Greenville SC has minimal (15 minutes on a really bad day) waiting, and polite & helpful staff. I've never had an experience like what's described in this post.

[Jackie Slover]

Try getting your daughter back after the mother runs with her against the court order not to leave the state. Then God rest her soul she dies. Her step-mother with whom she was visiting took the child and hid her while she paid money to keep her. Five years later 30 some thousand dollars later I am on my third lawyer and myhusbands daughter is not with us. Go figure.