Bureaucracy Is Fun

So this one time….

Don’t you love it when stories start like that? Me too. This particular tale is a tale of woe for some newly landed foreigners trying to navigate a system. A system that is fraught with danger…. the getting of a driver’s license.

It was early in our US experience. We needed a license to close some loans, it was a dotting I’s and crossing T’s thing. Problem was we couldn’t get a license without an SSN and we couldn’t get an SSN without a US issued ID (license) Great, right! (insert brick wall here) So a few major annoyances and an education in humanity later, I got a letter from Social Security (have you been there? OMG??!?!!) to say we weren’t entitled to an SSN and got ready to license up.

Now where we lived at the time in Connecticut, there was a long wait for appointments. A 2 month long wait, for a driving test! What craziness was this? Ok so maybe there’s too many people living here. But we finally booked appointments in a town 100, yes 100 miles away, are we having fun yet? ‘Merica…. so on our alotted appointment day we loaded up the family, not unlike the Beverly Hillbillies, at dawn and headed over to the DMV in *Crapcity, Connecticut with all our paperwork ready to go. We needed 3 forms of ID and our passports and blah blah, utility bills, you know ALL the bullshit that a Government department like the DMV needs. We had to take our driving tests too because being foreigners they needed us to prove we could drive. I’m totally gonna add that NYC doesn’t do that for their taxi drivers… ok moving on!

We also had to borrow our friend’s car because OUR car was licensed in Indiana and they needed a Connecticut state licensed car for us to test in, which they told us on our FIRST 200 mile round trip… What fresh Hell was this?  We managed to pass our written tests on that trip.
Anyway, fancy pants us tested in a brand new 500 series BMW… whatever Connecticut, whatever. The actual driving test took less than 5 minutes, we literally drove out the driveway, turned left, turned right and came back. The tester was great, he could see each of us could drive before we even left the parking lot. He spent the entire time asking me about living in Australia and why did I move here?

With the practical test now out of the way, we went inside to finalise the paperwork and get our mugshots photos taken. The King was first, handing over his paperwork. He had an SSN so he had an easy time, the 3 things he presented were acceptable and he got a shiny new Connecticut license.YAY…  Me, well I didn’t have enough paperwork. A marriage certificate was not good enough. It had to be the extract. My Australian license, well you KNOW that wasn’t gonna fly. And because all the utilities were in the King’s name I had nothing. I was able to produce 2 things they would accept but there was no way they were giving me my license that day. I had passed their written test, I passed their driving test but my passport, Australian license and US visa, all with my photograph on them were not enough to prove who I was. Really Connecticut? Really? All that was good enough for Homeland Security? But you are more special, more important than that? It was totally unbelievable.

baptism
Finally the woman at the counter told me that if I had a baptism certificate…. wait what? A church marriage certificate is NOT acceptable but a church baptism certificate is? I was in a spin. How insane?  So I said to the woman, “You’re telling me, I can go outside, find a church, get baptized, come back here and get my license?” She replied “Well, I doubt you can do that today but yes ma’am”

How totally fucked! I couldn’t understand the difference, it was mind boggling but I moved away from the counter like a good little lemming…. I was not going to go postal in the DMV, although I can so clearly see why people do!

We drove our 100 miles home, one of us licensed, and one of us scheduled to get back in the car again the next week, to our little cottage in Connecticut to marvel at the complete and utter stupidity of the country we had chosen to call home.

The following week, I got to drive back 100 miles to *Crapcity, Connecticut, while leaving the children in the King’s care, all ready to get my license. I may have been carrying a baptism certificate, designed, printed and signed the night before, by the fire in our little cottage by the lake….but I really couldn’t say.

 

And I have a New York state license now so NER, Connecticut, NER!

*Crapcity… not the real name but totally should be. 😛

Comments 7

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  1. Wow, what a bunch of crap you went through. Seriously–a baptism certificate over a marriage license? WTH? Mine is up for renewal in a few years and I have heard nightmare stories about all the paperwork involved–even for renewals. Not looking forward to that.

  2. This is awesome! And I hear you – I had a license in IA, got a new on in MO (which looked liked something I could have printed and laminated), then had to take the written text in MN – which I barely passed – after getting my permit at age 14, license at age 16…now at 22 – I could barely pass the exam…..because I hit the Spanish button and couldn’t undo that choice…did I mention I took Russian in high school and college…don’t know any Spanish….

    Yeah….DMV should be in charge of all national security – every one would give up trying anything because they’d realize it would never happen!

  3. This is hysterical in that OMG AMERICA IS JUST INSANE way. Still not as insane as the nonsense one goes through in France, but still. And I can’t helping laughing that you drove yourself without a license all 100 miles to the DMV to get a license…..

    PS my dad would totally have been like your tester, asking a million questions about why you chose to move from Australia. I can totally picture it! Forget about the driving test, you’re foreign? Let me ask you no end of questions!

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