The Best Entertainment

The DMV (or, as they call it back home, the MVD) is an interesting place. Most people have to go there at some point, so you get an interesting cross-section of humanity on display there. It isn't at any given time necessarily representative, but you could see anybody, those who are so fringy as to be off the grid entirely excepted. I hadn't been there myself in about five years, and had hoped to make it ten by renewing my license online, but it wasn't to be.

As I had no appointment, I was in for a long way. It ultimately amounted to some two and a half or three hours that I spent there, all told. Most of that time passed with me sitting next to this fairly young woman on her phone. When you hear a person talk on the phone for two hours, you begin to piece together an awful lot about their life. Trust me when I say that I learned plenty about this woman, and it was all terribly interesting.

She didn't know quite why her license had been suspended. That was the reason for her visit: to sort out this injustice. I do know the things that she didn't believe could be behind her problem. For one thing, she had managed to pay off the thousands of dollars in tickets she'd received. Were they paid off in time? I can't say, but she seemed to think so (not that losing her license was the motivating factor in paying them. A new job's background check was).

She also had ruled out the close call she'd had the night before. Evidently, she's been driving while rather buzzy. In fact, she believed that she probably ought to have been issued a DUI given how much she'd drank, but somehow she passed the tests and was not arrested. Perhaps it was some divine Providence? I wish I know what the true reason for her suspended license, and how it worked out for her, but both of those things must forever remain a mystery of the DMV.