Last month I had the wonderful opportunity to renew my drivers license. This time the whole procedure was only slightly less arduous than it was five years ago. Back then I had realized that my license needed to be renewed immediately and I managed to find a renewal place that was open late. I had realized at around 7:00 PM on my birthday that year that my license was about to expire and I hadn’t renewed it. They took a really bad picture of me when they snapped the shutter just as I looked up. It looked like someone was about to run me over with their car! A bad case of “headlight face”. The other thing with my old drivers license was that I had spelled my name wrong in the signature. A lot of people found this amusing. It was. So, this year, I was determined to spell my name correctly! Its good to set attainable goals.
Everything was going according to plan. I had gotten to the Motor Vehicle branch a couple of days early to renew my license this time. No more frantic last minute trips on my birthday THIS time! Of course, there wouldn’t have been time for it anyway, since I had two final exams on my birthday this year (and had to drive to Prince George the next morning). These were my last exams ever, but hopefully not the last birthday. So I walked up to the counter, gave them my old drivers license and my renewal form. I asked if they took debit cards, and they said they did. I pointed out that this was “good since I didn’t have any cash on me”. The lady looked at me and said that I should be “better prepared”. This seemed odd, if slightly annoying although I ignored it at the time. So I proceeded to pay my $40. Amazingly, my bank card worked this time, which isn’t a thing I can always count on. This would have been a wonderful time for it to go haywire, which might have indicated that I wasn’t “better prepared”.
The next step was to take the photo. She did all kinds of things like tilt your head this way, that way, lift your chin, stick your tongue out. Actually, I’m kidding about the head tilting. I thought this might be conducive to a reasonable picture. Actually, the resulting picture makes me look horribly anemic, but I don’t expect to have to publicly exhibit it all that often. Then came the time for me to sign my signature. I was determined to spell it correctly. Then I discovered that I was to sign with some sort of electronic pen on a touch screen. Well, this just wouldn’t do! I tried it, and I couldn’t see what I had written. This is perhaps one of the worst signatures I have ever committed to “paper”. The pen slipped, I couldn’t see what I was writing, and the area I was supposed to be writing in wasn’t all that clear. So I ended up cutting off the end of my last name. Now, at this time, I realized that I had been warned that these things were hard to handle (the pen and pad, not signature writing in general). Someone else I knew had taken around 5 cracks at the signature apparatus before finally getting it right. So when my signature, once again of horrific quality, showed up on the screen I asked to do it again.
This is when things got “interesting”.
Now, I have had it pointed out to me by certain parental units that the reason things like this happen to me is that I have a bad attitude at those points in time. I don’t believe this to be the case, nor have eyewitnesses that have viewed events such as those I am about to describe. I’m not sure why this phenomenon occurs, but it does, and while it makes for interesting rant fodder, it isn’t all that good for my blood pressure, whatever the hell it may be.
So I asked to have another signature attempt because of the rather reprehensible quality of the last one. I attributed this to my lack of experience with such equipment. The response: “No”. I asked again (politely I might add…). “No, you only get one shot at it”. Well, dammit, I wanted to do this signature again, so I asked again, perhaps lacking the usual polite touches to such a query, but once again the answer was “No”. This time it was accompanied by head shaking (always a sign that trouble is afoot). I pointed out that I knew for certain that the ability exists within software or whatever the hell they use there to give people another try at the signature. She literally snorted. Then she walked away. I was dismissed.
When she came back, I asked again why I was not able to redo my signature. She said: “It looks fine”. I pointed out what my name in fact was. She looked at the signature and I think a small smirk surfaced, although it was hard to tell through all that makeup. It was then pointed out, without any polite pleasantries or such things, that I was NOT going to be able to redo my signature and was stuck with what I had already written.
Now, I don’t usually mount any sort of outburst in public, but this was a little different. I actually called her a “rule book”, even though I am not entirely sure how that applied here. I forget what she said to that, but I did manage to draw the attention of one of her colleagues, who was now paying attention to our “conversation”. “Well”, I said, “Don’t worry about it, given the chance I’d cling to whatever insignificant amount of power I had too!” This is the sort of outburst that normally occurs in my head, but not usually out loud (for good reason). She walked away again, and I wasn’t surprised this time.
The next little debacle at the Motor Vehicle branch that day was the fact that they take your old license from you, and issue a new one later (a paper one takes its place in the interim). This wouldn’t have been made out to be an issue without the preceding conversations and ample usage of the phrase “You should be better prepared”. So I made an issue of it this time. I asked what I was to do for photo ID without my drivers license. I had forgotten the existence of my CementLandTM student card, but she didn’t know that. “Well, you don’t get to keep it, we have to send it to Victoria.” Well, this you cannot blame them for I guess, but she added in another insult along with it. I asked what I was to do if I needed photo ID. This is, once again, where the phrase: “You should have thought of that before now.” came into play. This got me a little angry, and I don’t think it was really for legitimate reasons, but whatever.
So first of all, lets say that if any sort of retribution due to the calling of security or what have you evidently didn’t occur. Sure, I’m a little paranoid, but its OK because its YOU they are after! The summoning of security forces for no legitimate reason is a favourite pastime of the CementLand bureaucrats, so I have been trained to expect it. Such action there usually is met with security giving the bureaucrats a lecture on “calling us when there is a real problem”. This is quite delicious to listen to, considering the normally preceding circumstances.
So thoughts of this drivers license calamity eventually receded into the depths of my brain, replaced by the study of cognitive psychology and the environmental physiology of animals. It immediately surfaced, however, when I was in line at the Prince George airplane garage for my ride back to Vancouver over a week later. I was reading the printed out information sheet that was, in essence, the ticket for my flight and noticed something about “photo ID” being necessary to confirm my flight status. In retrospect, this sentence said “positive ID”, which is a good thing I suppose, since I don’t carry negative ID. I wonder if I was carrying ID for someone called Jimmy Thudpucker or something like that would constitute “negative” ID. Well, whatever. Since this registered in my mind at the time as “photo ID” I was instantly drawn back into the insanity at the Motor Vehicle branch. I didn’t have good photo ID, just my student card. Suddenly the paranoia wheels in my brain started to work again at full capacity. What if the ID I had didn’t constitute “photo” ID since it wasn’t issued by government? Well, I needn’t have worried, since they didn’t’ ask me for ANY ID at the airport. I could have been an escaped convict from that spiffy new jail they’ve built up there and wrested this piece of paper from that unfortunate sod who was chasing his had across the parking lot (a hypothetical example…). In retrospect, I should have been more concerned that the bagel and can of fizzy hummingbird water I had just consumed that cost me $4.10, or the fact that planes crash occasionally, and it was REALLY windy outside. Well, I survived, but the flight attendants told bad jokes over the intercom, which I suppose is better than being subjected to the breakfast food that they called “waffles”. This scenario was acted out on a prior flight, and these little soggy flour discs filled with something tasting tart like rhubarb, the memory of which still haunt me to this day.
I suppose that I would be remiss in not including the signature I talked to eloquently about in the above text. Well, here it is. I include it at the end only because I have been given the opportunity to defend the circumstances of its birth without your having prior knowledge of its disfigurements. For future reference, my first name is NOT “Mu”. If you didn’t already know my name, and many of you probably don’t, I’m not sure what your first guess would be. “Mu Real”, or something like that. Stop laughing, that is not my name!
