Street legal

By the grace of God and lack of automatic weapons, I’ve transferred the last vestiges of Virginia to Washington. Yesterday I registered my car and got a local driver’s license.

You might wonder why I’m doing it now, after I’ve been here for a year. The forcing function was that my Virginia license was going to expire on Monday. While I don’t mind scoffing the “you must get a Washington license/registration within 30 days of moving in” law, I won’t drive with expired plates or license.

(The plates were good until November, but I also won’t drive with a discrepancy in the two things a cop would ask for when you’re stopped for a traffic violation. Which I haven’t had in more than 20 years; but the instant I fell into the “dodgy” category, you know I’d get stopped for driving 36.5 MPH in a 35 zone.)

The Evergreen State made it as difficult and as tedious as possible, of course.

Point 1: You have to go to two separate offices if you want both the DL and the registration. And by “separate offices” I mean “you’re lucky if they’re both in the same town”.

Point 2: You don’t have to prove you have an actual, you know, state residence to register your car, but you do to get a license.

Point 3: Among the documents as proof of residency they’ll accept is a “valid concealed weapon permit issued by a county in Washington”. Or an order to hook up cable TV in your residence.

Point 4: They’ve spent a good deal of time and thought on devising the least efficient system possible for processing people at the drivers license office, which maximizes the customers’ waiting time and frustration. In addition to never having all seven windows staffed at one time, somehow they came up with the idea of running two “take-a-number-&-wait-your-turn” series concurrently.

I have no idea what the criteria were for sending you links or rechts, but there was some arcane and arbitrary method of calling two-digit or three-digit numbers from the various windows. When I got there the woman I sat next to had number 60, and had seen three of the windows steadily calling numbers up to 59; and then a long stall.

Still—she’d only been there a little over 30 minutes before 60 was called. I was there 75 before I got to go up to the golden window with 379.

Naturally there was a computer glitch—the system didn’t like my street address and the bureaucrat had to grill me that what I’d put down was really real before she’d override it. (What the point of bringing in documents with my correct address on them—not a gun permit, though—was when she went ahead and basically manually entered the address, I do not know.)

Then I had to wait in another line to have my photo taken and receive a temporary license. “Your real one will be sent to you in eight to ten days.”

Point 5: Both car and license offices do not take debit or credit cards. What’s up with that?

In Virginia, not a place one would consider a hotbed of innovation, especially in government, you go to a single office to take care of any motor vehicle-related business. You can pay your fees with cash, checks and about every type of plastic known to mankind (and the fees were much lower than the ones I’ve paid here, for both registration and license). The person who processes your application also takes your photo and you walk out of the place with your real, laminated driver’s license.

Point 6: To replace my personalized plates, I have to wait 30 days to apply for the new plates. If they graciously deign to grant them to me (for way more money than I was paying in the Old Dominion), I wait another eight weeks. On the application form you put down what you want on the plates. Then you have to tell them what it means.

Only there's no room for sock puppets.

Really, I hate turning in my Virginia persona, especially for this lame, ersatz, overpriced lot. But it had to be done.

And maybe I should look into the concealed weapons permit.