Let me give you a little bit of an intro, first thing is, I just moved to Tennessee from Ohio. That being said I had to switch everything over to the new state. This sucked, big time! I would rather ride a bike with no seat, or run down a street wet while people lined the streets with tazers trying to hit me. I might even rather smash my own toe with a hammer… than ever go to the license bureau again. And that is in my home state, let alone another states bureau, especially Tennessee’s.
So apparently it is illegal to have an out of state drivers license if you have a current address in the new state. So I was breaking the law! Plus, I had expired tags and you can’t change your tags without a valid Tennessee driver’s license. Hopefully you can start to get an idea why I was frustrated right off the bat.
So I set out early in the morning around 6:45 am… thinking that the place opened at 7:00 am. This information turned out to be wrong and I waited for an hour just to get in 8:00 am. Once I was in, I found out that this particular location did not do what I needed done. I was going to have to go for a 30-minute drive south to the full service location to get my license changed over.
I would like to stop here a second to say that we don’t need an express lane for anything to do with government services. It sounds like it would be a good idea… but the government can screw up anything… even an express service, we should all know this by now.
So I am at the full service location… in line just to get a number in order to sit down and be waited upon. I finally get to the front of the line and talk to the lady at the desk. She is there to basically make sure that everybody has the right information to do what he or she needs to do. This is where I find out that I don’t! Clearly you can’t prove you are a citizen of the U.S. with a social security card, and then not even with a still valid Ohio driver’s license. URG!!!
So I have to go all the way home and find my passport that I haven’t used since my honeymoon… or my birth certificate, which is most likely, buried in the boxes that are still packed.
No problem, I go home and find it pretty fast thankfully, at this time it is about 9:30am. This is where I thought “well maybe this will change everything and my luck will be better”. I was wrong. I left, taking with me some lunch and some things I needed for a meeting at 1:00pm, thinking I will have time in between to have a lunch. I was wrong again.
I find a location (full service) close to where my meeting is and present my information and get my number rather fast. I then sit in the back next to a very old Chinese fellah and his young daughter. No problem, I will be out of here in an hour. Damn my optimism! One hour goes by and I am still sitting there but my number was next and things where getting better. Wrong! They skip me and before I can say anything an announcement goes across the P.A.
“Please do not send anything to the camera for processing it is down.” Next, the guy tells us to bear with him while he restarts the computer to get the camera up. This pushes me back another 45 minutes.
It is now 11:15 am and the camera is up and working and they call another number that is well past mine. I go and ask if there was a reason that I was skipped and the lady says, “no, you should have been listening” I wanted to kill her and her southern drawl! I didn’t, but I wanted too. She politely hands me another number. Another number seriously! I have been here for 2 hours!! I should have next priority, but no I get to go back to my seat, which is now next to a very smelly old dude that snores really loud but manages to hear his number and get ahead of me.
12:15 pm rolls around and I hear my number and I am so happy I want to scream! I don’t. I get in and out in 15 minutes and have a very angry license picture to prove how crappy the day was.
To top it all off, I had to go get my actual plates later in the day because I had no time because of my meeting. I will save you the pain of hearing the other half of this story, I will just tell you that the plate took me 2 days.
I hate when the government thinks they can handle everything, when that can’t agree on anything. But we will come together on an agency to run your life and it will be awesome! It never is! NEVER! Minimal government, minimal problems! That’s my motto.