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Visit to California DMV offers challenges for Idahoan

'What is it you don’t understand about what I just told you?”Fill out the paper and come back tomorrow. Not today. Tomorrow.'

Steve Crump
Opinion: The Times News (Twin Falls)
A visit to any of the 44 Division of Motor Vehicles offices around Idaho is nothing to be anxious about. The folks you’ll find inside are pretty much like the crowd standing in queues for All You Can Eat Shrimp at the Golden Corral.

Not so in California, where I moved las month. The Sacramento DMV is Oz, plain and simple.

Inside the front door stands a man — let’s call him the Ringmaster, because no other term will do — whose job it is to manage the demands of the strangest crowd you’d never want to meet. Some are off their meds, others are confused, most are angry, some are trying to pass a California driver’s test with no knowledge of any other language than Pashtu. And quite a few have not bathed in some time.

The Ringmaster’s job is not to suffer fools gladly. And he does it so well.

“What is it you don’t understand about what I just told you?” he said to a customer while I was standing in line nearby. “Fill out the paper and come back tomorrow.

“Not today. Tomorrow.”

The Ringmaster clearly has some sort of supervisory position with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, but he’s not paid enough. The man is a poster child for stroke.

And yet as a whole, this particular California DMV office seems to grasp fully that they’ve collectively fallen through the rabbit hole and can’t do much about it. I’m sure there are librarians and cops and teachers and other normal people who visit the Broadway office, but they’re mostly outnumbered by aliens from the Planet Zircon.

One fellow I encountered had failed his eighth consecutive driver’s test. He didn’t take it well.

As a couple of security guards looked on tensely, he was remonstrating with his license examiner about how Jerry Brown —California’s current and former governor — was out to get him. And always had been.

The driver’s license testing comes at the end of the process at the DMV. My wife Victoria missed two of the 34 questions on her test and got her license. I missed eight and didn’t.

Which means that come Monday, the Ringmaster and I will have to tango again.

I wonder what color the sky over DMV will be that morning?