Having spent 8 1/2 useless hours (I have to go back at least once more, hopefully soon) at the DMV, this title occurred to me much more than once, especially while I had to deal with hopelessly inaccurate information that led me to waste this time, and with horrifyingly caustic DMV workers who care for humanity so little that I don't doubt they eat their own children. The lowest point was when a miserable employee, miserable with her job and with her life (and for good reason) asked me why I hadn't gone to Information if I had a question. I told her that since I didn't know that I had the wrong form, and since I didn't know that I was missing an important document, I therefore didn't know that I had a question. When I mentioned a little later that I'd been there for about 7 hours (at that point), another woman responded, "That doesn't matter!"
It was then that the above title occurred to me. I pictured a detective saying that they needed to put together a list of possible suspects for the woman who said the line above, and then someone else saying, "She's a DMV worker. That could take years." Maybe a close-up of that same detective saying to someone, "Okay, so we have all the possible suspects here now?" The man next to him nods, and then we pull way back and see that they're standing at home plate at Fenway, and that every seat is filled. (That's about 38,000 suspects.) The book or movie ends like one of the finales of the movie Clue, where it turns out that everyone involved had a role in her demise--all 38,000 of them. Or maybe it turns out that she'd committed suicide because she was so pathetically miserable. She stands at the Pearly Gates, but the Saint says "Uh, no, sorry, you've filled out the wrong form," and then boots her ass to Hell where she belongs.
I figured I'd get this out of my system before I went back. But I'm not bitter or anything. Nope.
(Please feel free to comment on your own nightmarish DMV experiences, either by commenting below or using the email above.)
I don't necessarily have bad DMV experiences-- but maybe sometime I should share about the northern NY police officer who gave me a ticket during my grandmother's funeral for having an overdue inspection that I was unaware of (it was not long after moving to MA, and hadn't changed my info over to MA, and didn't realize that my inspection was overdue in NY). P and I were in the car, dressed in black, in a procession, obviously upset, and when I mentioned I was afraid if the funeral procession left without us we would be lost and wouldn't be able to find the graveyard he snapped at me, "Its a small town, I'm sure you'll find it."I think he might have won the "asshole of the year" award.
ReplyDeleteWow! That IS terrible! That guy and the woman I wrote about should get together--they deserve each other! These are people whose lives are so meaningless that they HAVE to use whatever little bit of power they have to validate themselves. I wouldn't want to be the woman I described, or that guy--they're so miserable, you just have to let them use whatever smidgen of power they have, because that's ALL they have.
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