An Average Day at the DMV

It was time to renew the pickup registration. I went to the local DMV office. You know the routine. They gave me a number. K692. I sat with forty or fifty other people staring at a board, waiting. Finally they announced my number for a hole in the wall in the other room.

"Do you have your Emissions Report?", she asked me. "No." "You have to have that before you come here," she said.

She told me where the emissions testing site was: on a frontage road in the middle of a construction zone.

Two hours later, I was back, again, and they gave me a new number: K699. Half an hour later, they called my new number, for a hole in the wall in the other room.

I did arithmetic as I walked. "K699 minus K692 is K7," I calculated. "One every seventeen minutes. On the average."

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