I drove all the way to Capitola, a major outing for one who seldom ventures east of the San Lorenzo River if I can help it, because I had to renew my driver’s license and had gone as far as I could online, and because I’m over 70 I had to show up in person to get my vision tested and a mug shot taken.
It was only after I got home that I noticed they’d signed me up for organ donation and promised a pink dot on my new license to let the medics know in case I die in a crash to cut me up and save the working parts for some other afflicted soul. I feel sorry for anyone so desperate for a spare organ they’d take one of mine. My body has seen better days, as I am reminded almost every time I move, so even though I’m still mobile I doubt my organs would do much good for anyone. I’ll send the organ harvesters in Sacramento a note to that effect.
What I want to tell you about is my trip to the DMV, which was not nearly as unpleasant as I’d expected. The parking lot wasn’t too full, there wasn’t a line out the door, I had an appointment, the process was surprisingly efficient. The man at the door checked my ID and gave me a number, which was called about a minute after I sat down, about 20 minutes ahead of the appointed time.
The clerk behind the window was intelligent, genial and matter-of-fact, checking the accuracy of the information I had filled out online. After the vision test, which I aced easily with my progressive lenses on, he sent me with my temporary papers to the camera man, with just one person ahead of me, and he too was no-nonsense efficient; he’d done this a million times and he had it down. He asked me to take off my hat with my back to the blue screen, I looked at the blue dot just below the lens, a flash went off and that was that. I signed the plastic pad with a stylus and the camera man said coolly, “You’re good to go.”
These guys go through the same steps with scores of people a day, all day, all kinds of people in all kinds of moods and conditions, and this was after 2 in the afternoon and they were composed, calm, almost nonchalant in their shrugging patience with a repetitive job facing the public hour after hour. They seemed at ease, and I was impressed with their equanimity in executing a routine I wouldn’t have lasted half an hour trying to do, unemployable as I am.
Like postal clerks, librarians, election officials and other government bureaucrats — the sinister “deep state” of MAGA mythology — the clerks at the DMV are professionals just doing their jobs to make civilization run, imposing rational order on what would otherwise be chaos. Such giant bureaucracies as the California Department of Motor Vehicles, with its codes and laws, its license plate numbers and Vehicle ID numbers and driver’s license numbers (now known as Real ID, so you don’t have to drive to be identified and filed in a government database) — such institutions keep the freeways rolling, for better or worse, as the automobile, like the smartphone, is for most people an unfortunately indispensable technology.
On the drive back to the Westside, on surface streets, there was a lot of roadwork going on but not that much traffic. It was a cool but comfortable 59 degrees and nobody was firing missiles or dropping bombs on my town, destroying buildings, leveling neighborhoods and randomly killing civilians, so I remembered to feel lucky in our peaceful enclave, even though the election turned out worse than I’d dared to imagine.
Attitude is almost everything, as the dudes at the DMV demonstrated in otherwise dehumanizing circumstances, not diminished by drudgery but serving with grace and professional dignity. I thank you, gentlemen, for your example.
