Today’s the day Nicholas and I assault the mighty mountain of bureaucracy known as the NC DMV and attempt to get his regular Class C driving licence at his appointment in North Raleigh this afternoon!
Oh…joy.
Welcome to “Adulting Sucks (DMV Edition)!”
If you’ve not experienced the joys of getting a REAL ID from the DMV’s driving licence offices, you truly have not lived a full life!
Sherman…set the Wayback Machine(tm) for a couple of years ago well before the REAL ID push became a bureaucratic tsunami of epic proportions.
Prior to REAL ID and the COVID-19 restrictions, it was a relatively painless process to pop over to the DMV licence office of your choice, fill out the stack of forms, sit whatever exams they wished to inflict upon you, blind you with a horrific photostrobe and even worse resulting picture from what laughingly passes as a “camera”, and assuming all went well you’d be off with a shiny new driving licence in one visit.
Occasionally, the unwary would be tripped up by the bureaucracy and have to make a return trip but as long as you were armed with enough documentation to prove you exist to clog the average industrial-grade shredder, you were generally going to be OK and it’d take maybe 30-60 minutes depending on how busy that location happened to be.
I turned up at the licence office well before closing with the Pile O’ Documents(tm) in hand in the quest for a REAL ID after collecting the kids from their three different schools. And initially it seems this office was being smart by having someone triage your documents before you sat waiting for hours just to end up crying in futility when the examiner didn’t like what you have.
Checkpoint Charlie was passed with a warning that if I don’t get to the examiner before quitting time, I’ll have to come back and do this again. Now we’re sitting in the waiting area that does not appear to be particularly busy with 90 minutes until closing and several examiners. Should be a piece of cake, right?
It would have been until you realised two of the examiners were literally doing *NOTHING* the entire time we were there and a third surprised us that they were physically alive with actual movement to go to the printer and back and then never moved again. Two other examiners seemed to be reasonably busy with people who took *FOREVER* to go through a process that should have taken ten minutes. And there were three people between me and the few examiners actually doing anything.
This is when we started wondering if I was going to walk out with a licence. Finally I get called to the examiner’s booth at 1658 hours…only two minutes to spare! Ten minutes later I have a paper temporary licence in hand as NC had moved production of the plastic licences to a centralised facility.
It could have been worse.
Much worse.
That was what my mother found out when she unwittingly committed the cardinal sin of getting a REAL ID in North Carolina if your name changes due to marriage and you don’t change it back after divorce or death of the spouse.
Because the powers-that-be are kind of paranoid about Soviet-era sleeper agents getting a REAL ID of their own, you have to legally prove every single name change from the time you were born until now.
Who knew that a practise of easy name changes via a marriage licence that was in play well before I was born would come to completely bite her in the hiney decades after the fact?
This would involve getting an original birth certificate to replace the one lost in the house fire from the central vitals records office in New Jersey because her birthplace no longer exists and they shipped the birth certificates to Trenton rather than the sizeable town literally next door! Not only was dealing with them from several states away such a joy, the people had that wonderful Jersey attitude to boot. I really felt for my sister on this one but it’s probably just as well she took this one for the team…Trenton might not have survived otherwise!
And then she needed the marriage licence to my Dad from rural Illinois (ironically the easiest of the bunch to obtain!), the divorce decree (which I found after searching many boxes of my father’s records that had been repatriated to the cupboard under my stairs), and a road trip to South Carolina for the marriage certificate to my stepfather.
And even after doing all this, it was *STILL* a complete pain in the ass involving multiple visits (and IIRC, the involvement of Social Security to update her card) and an array of people ranging from merely disinterested to actually hostile to accomplishing the goal.
Mind you…occasionally you can have a bit of luck even in the land of the Prematurely Toilet-Trained At Gunpoint(tm) as Nicholas and I did last year when we went for the appointment to get his permit.
We had all of the documents we needed from the driving school and high school as well as everything to prove his eligibility for REAL ID.
What we didn’t have and was somewhat awkward when the examiner triaging the queue outside of the licence office asked after it was *MY* driving licence. I had updated the permanent address for the kids with their schools that morning which required scanning my driving licence…and it was still sitting on the scanner back in Raleigh with no time for me to make a quick run back home to get it for an appointment that had taken forever to get!
Fortunately, I think the thoroughness of the other documentation and the fact that I carry my passport with me is what saved the day and she turned a blind eye to the legality of how we’d arrived in her car park.
I’ll go so far as to say she was the coolest DMV licence examiner I’ve ever met. 🙂
So now we have another mighty mountain of documents to hopefully satisfy the bureaucratic beast…and I can assure you the passport and the driving licence will definitely be with me this afternoon.
The only question is will the Force be with Nicholas as he’s not particularly comfortable driving the Traverse and we’ve not had as much dual time as I’d have liked due to the priority of getting him officially graduated from high school being more than a full-time job these past few months.
He should qualify for the road test waiver (DMV’s web site is pretty unclear but the lady at the DMV call centre was unambiguous on that point…no, he doesn’t need the log!) but that’s up to the examiner to decide.
Even if he has to do the road test (which would seem doubtful given the dreadful weather forecast for this afternoon), it’s apparently a cones course in the car park in these COVID-19 times.
At least that would be slightly more challenging than the road test I was subjected to in Mississippi which was four right turns round the mall and done.
I have a feeling he’ll have a new slip of paper that will be fairly handy when he gets a job at the service department of a car dealer as part of his automotive technology programme at Wake Tech.
Wish us luck! 🙂
