Having abandoned any hope of getting an appointment in a timely fashion before Katie’s eligibility certificate expires, we now need to figure out where we’re going to turn up and wait our turn in the queue to hopefully get the REAL ID applications sorted.
With that in mind, we stopped by the DMV licence office on New Bern Avenue on Monday afternoon after Katie’s lacrosse training to see just how bad the crowds were and enquire as to how likely we were to be able to pull off getting the job done whilst on the short list in the waiting area later in the week.
As I came in the door round 1615 hours, there really didn’t seem to be much of a crowd waiting for service in the two sets of seats and only one person ahead of me behind the traffic cone for people waiting to be told where to go. The relatively empty lobby seemed a good omen at the time.
The office itself has a rather interesting design. And by interesting, I mean that whoever came out with the layout and colour choices assuredly had to have served in (or been a guest of!) the NC Department of Public Safety.
To be fair, it’s nowhere near as psychologically oppressive as designer Doug Wilson’s horrifying creation called the “Prison of Love” where he gave the poor homeowners a jail-themed makeover for their bedroom on TLC’s “Trading Spaces”. Complete with a prison-themed mural above the bed, a bench consisting of a board sitting on two tankless toilets, some jail cells, and other touches that just screams GULAG!
The walls are that special shade of grey that can only be described as NC Central Prison Chic. There are seats to either side of the entrance and two traffic cones where one waits to be attended to by an employee inside what appears to be an armoured plexiglass booth. The examiner’s stations are hidden behind the wall behind the armoured booth so you can’t see if they’re occupied unless someone comes out from behind the wall.
I will give the designer some credit here…at least the booth wasn’t elevated! When I visited the DMV office in downtown Daytona Beach to return the plates for Dad’s van, the decor and colour choices were very similar but the big difference was that the booth inhabited by the triage employee was on a base about half a meter high which kind of put one in mind of a machine gun nest guarding the penitentiary.
Long story short (sorry, too late!)…this is not one of the most welcoming places I’ve ever visited and certainly didn’t really encourage me to want to stay for a significant amount of time. If that was the intent, I’ll say it succeeded in that mission quite well!
Sadly, the one person that was occupying the armoured booth escaped out the door to attend to some personal errand before I could ask her if the crowd I was seeing was representative of what I could expect from 1430 onwards on a typical day.
I understand feeling like you’re late as if you’re the rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland” (I feel that way often given the hectic goings on in my typical day!) but don’t think that taking less than one minute to answer a pretty simple question well before the end of the working day was too much to ask.
Twenty minutes later, the lady in front of me and I were *STILL* waiting for someone to man the plexiglass armoured booth.
When someone finally noticed we were there and I was able to ask if what I was seeing was representative of the expected wait time, the lady’s first response was to mention that they were short-staffed.
Even if the appointment application were less brain-dead, there’s still the small matter of the scarcity of driver’s licence examiners in the actual offices as their ranks took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic and have yet to recover to their pre-pandemic levels.
And let’s be brutally honest here: whilst I’m sure there are plenty of DMV licence examiners who are doing their best to cope with the massive demand due to the REAL ID Act and the fact that we’re one of the fastest growing regions of this country, there’s a reason why the movie “Zootopia” picked a particular species of animal for Flash the DMV employee.
But I’d respectfully suggest that if you’re going to use inadequate staffing as the first line of defence, wouldn’t it seem to be prudent to make an actual effort to recruit more examiners to their office by posting an…I don’t know…*HELP DESPERATELY WANTED!* sign?!?
But the bigger concern was that the first point of contact was continually unmanned for quite a long time and potential customers were made to wait even more unnecessarily because no one in the hidden areas could be bothered to take on the task of monitoring the front of the office and dealing with the people who were waiting there.
Whether you choose to accept the staffing excuse or the feeling that the productivity expectations from management are decidedly lower than what you’d expect in the private sector, the bottom line is that one couldn’t help but leave the office with the impression that no one at that particular branch really cared whether you accomplished what you were trying to accomplish or that your time was at all valuable.
That’s not exactly the impression I’d imagine they’d want us leaving their office with, eh?