Your Bureaucracy at Work for You
I didn't think I was committing a major transgression against humanity simply by buying a car. Just about everyone has bought a car at some time, right?
It must have been the circumstances that made my particular purchase so heinously evil. (I must conclude it was evil; otherwise, why would I be punished so severely? If the punishment really fits the crime, whatever I did must really have been horrible.)
The story begins way back at the end of August. While we were checking out houses to rent in Cleveland, a couple weeks before moving here, I bought a car. It was the perfect time. My Honda Accord has served me faithfully for 17 years, but was beginning to suffer recurrent major failures. Nothing vital-the essential workings were still in fine order; but always something that was (1) perishable and (2) expensive. There didn't seem much point in dragging it 2,500 miles (4,000 km) here, where the extreme weather may have proved too difficult for the poor tired old thing. Anyway, we also had time to go car shopping during our house-hunting visit, and we found a Honda dealership not far from the in-laws' place that was open well into the evening. So, by the time we returned to Seattle, I had a new silver Civic stashed in Kathy's family's driveway.
We began to suffer through Ohio's incredibly tortuous vehicle licensing system a mere three days after completing our cross-country move on September 16. Kathy, who didn't start her job until October 3, slogged through the whole process over two interminable afternoons of standing around in line, accruing vast, angry purple networks of varicose veins, and waiting for her number to be called.
I expected to have a much easier time of it: I'd bought my car in Ohio, and therefore would be exempt from the vehicle identification number (VIN) search, the title change and the emissions check ("E-check"), for each of which Kathy was forced to drive to various well-hidden locales far on the eastern and southern outskirts of the city. I could complete the final required step, obtaining the license plates, at an ordinary licensing office-and we have one of those right up the street from us. I had until Sept. 29 before my 30-day temporary registration expired.
All I can say is this: when I'm wrong, I don't do it halfway.
I took off work a hour and a half early on Sept. 22 to take care of my car registration. By the time I got home, changed, gathered the papers from the sale and hauled over to the licensing office, it was 4:15. Still plenty of time. And to my delight, there was hardly any line, and only one screaming child. (The number of screaming children in any department of motor vehicles varies widely, according to the neighborhood and number of such offices in a given municipality; but there is always at least one. I suppose that in lieu of playing Muzak, the government hires young single mothers to stand around in DMV offices and feed their babies Tabasco. It's sort of a public service. Personally, I'd prefer the Muzak. I might fall asleep whilst standing in line, but at least I'd escape with my blood uncurdled.)
I quickly advanced to the head of the line and presented to the nice lady at the desk every piece of official-looking paper I obtained while purchasing my car. She asked me where the car title was. "Should I have received one?" I asked. Well, apparently, yes. I realized that the dealership had probably sent my title to my old address. Still, long before this time it should have arrived at our new address through forwarding. Instead of waiting for the title to get forwarded to me, the lady said, I should go ahead and obtain a duplicate title. Unfortunately, the nearest title office is ten minutes' drive away, and they close at 4:30. What time is it now? 4:21. It figures.
(My original title never did reach us. I've noticed that while all the junk mail sent to our old address zips through the forward without a millisecond's delay, all the important mail gets snagged somewhere in the process, and may take a week or two to free itself. And, of course, really important mail, like my car title, gets sucked into the insatiable maw of the Dead Letter Department. By now that title is not only dead, it's fossilized.
I spent the rest of my business day attempting to secure a checking account. Everything went swimmingly until the bank's computer noticed I had a decent credit rating, and therefore required the teller to offer me trillions of dollars' worth of credit I didn't need. When I declined this credit, the computer was so surprised that I would refuse an opportunity to consume, consume, consume that it locked up. It took thirty minutes and the bank's entire staff to get it working again. And when I used an out-of-state driver's license as identification, the computer, still weak from the earlier trauma, locked up again. My teller wound up completing my paperwork on actual paper. I was there an hour and a half. I arrived home thoroughly starved and overstressed.
It seemed that I'd have to visit the title department after all. Again I left work early, by two hours this time, and made the long drive out east. Ideally, I could take care of the title and the other registration issues all in one trip. At this location, an anonymous suburban strip mall, a regular car registration office was just a few doors down from the title office. The obligatory screaming baby in this branch was so loud and shrill that the mother was getting hostile looks from the majority of the clientele. She stepped outside with her screech owl for a few minutes, so that briefly, the office contained no screaming children(!!!); but she returned before the universe had a chance to collapse in on itself as a result of the violation of natural law. Since the line operated on the "take-a-number" principle, I carefully situated myself on whatever side of the door the baby wasn't, and watched through the glass wall (when I was outside) and past the cringing patrons for my number to come up. Up it did, in fact, come, and I soon found myself talking to another nice lady, by the name of Andrea.
Andrea and I would become fast friends over the following couple of weeks. Thrown together by cruel fate, we would form the special fraternal bond of people who have survived a long trial by working together against incredible odds. She was no more to blame for what would follow than I. Both of us were the unwilling victims of an immense, unfeeling bureaucracy that chews up the souls of humankind and spits them out, broken and bleeding, onto the asphalt.
But that was later. For now, she looked at all the papers I'd brought, and noticed that I did not have any record that I had paid for the car in full. Evidently I could not obtain a new title until the financial status of the car was known unequivocally. Thus, I had to call the dealership and ask them to fax Andrea a bill of sale saying that the car was paid for. But I couldn't do that right then, because somehow none of the documents I had on me bore the seller's phone number, and the title office had officially closed by this time, anyway. Calling the dealership that evening revealed that the title, with near-perfect timing, had been mailed out the same day we set out from Seattle in the moving van. Oh SIGH. I negotiated with the sales department to fax a copy of the bill of sale, showing that I'd paid for the car in full, to Andrea at the title office.
The next day (Sept. 27), I called Andrea early in the afternoon to make sure the bill of sale had arrived-you know, so I wouldn't take off from work early and drive all the way out there again for no reason. It had, but for some reason it did not state anywhere that the car was paid for. I gave the dealership another ring, and within an hour or two, verified that this time they had gotten it right. Off I went yet again. This time I felt confident. This time for sure!
I handed my paperwork to Andrea and waited expectantly for my new car title. She checked the bill of sale. No problem there. Then she said that she needed to call the Washington title bureau to make sure that my car hadn't been titled in Washington. After all, I was a Washington resident when I bought it, so it could have happened. We both knew better, but by Ohio law she had to call anyway, as a formality. She found the number for the Washington title bureau in this big listing of US state DMVs that she had lying around for some reason, and gave them a call. Sure enough, it was quickly verified that my vehicle was not registered in Washington. Andrea tried to enter that piece of information into my account, but the computer beeped and flashed some ominous warning at her. She informed me with great regret what the computer had just told her: that a verbal confirmation was insufficient to establish lack of registration in Washington. I would need a written confirmation. What's worse, according to whatever bizarre privacy laws that allowed her to obtain information from the Washington bureau but not to use that information in any useful way, I would need to request the written confirmation in person.
Luckily, I could still call the Washington title bureau when I got home, even though the business day had come to a close in Cleveland. (The three-hour time difference comes in handy on occasion.) Yet I still had to leave a message, which was not returned that day. I concluded that the staff had already gone home for the day. Remember back when banks were only open from 10 to 3? Well, the Washington title bureau must be where people work who can't handle the grueling, career-driven schedule of a 10-to-3 banker. The last time I got home from work by 1:00 PM, I was in kindergarten.
I asked Kathy to try calling again after 8:00 the next morning, Pacific Time (I can't call long-distance from my cubicle), and to ask them to ring me at work. As the afternoon dragged on, I began to wonder whether it would be easier just to fly to Seattle and camp out at the entrance of the Ballard licensing bureau so that I'd be ready and waiting when the place decided to open for a few minutes. Turned out I was overly pessimistic; I got the call a mere three hours after Kathy had left her follow-up message. I learned that the bureau wouldn't hand out certificates of non-registration to just anyone who asked for one over the telephone. Nosiree-Bob, I had to download a written form from the Web, fill it out, get it notarized (!!!), and fax it to them, with the special request that they fax the form to Andrea.
Can you see why I started thinking of this project as the Many-headed Hydra? Each time I solved one problem, or evaded one obstruction, two more would immediately spring forth to take its place. The analogy is apt in one other respect: you'll recall that defeating the Hydra was one of the twelve tasks of Hercules, appointed him for an unavoidable but serious offense against the gods. Just like Hercules, I've committed the unforgivable offense of buying a car, and now I was to complete this Herculean task as penance. And just as Hercules would never have completed the task without his nephew Iolaus there to cauterize the Hydra's severed necks, I would never have succeeded without Kathy ferrying me about and making and taking calls at home.
I also thought of my predicament as "Zeno's License Plates." The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno described an apparent paradox in the form of a race between Achilles and a tortoise. The tortoise is given a 100-yard lead. At the sound of the gun (or the bow and arrow, or whatever the Greeks used to start races with) Achilles quickly covers the 100 yards; but in the time he takes to run that distance, the tortoise has plodded 10 yards along. Now Achilles has 10 yards to catch up, and he swiftly travels that distance; but in the meantime the tortoise has moved forward 1 yard. And so on, ad infinitum. Zeno claimed that Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, because every time he covers the distance between where he is now and where the tortoise is now, the tortoise has managed to advance another, smaller distance. We now know better: the sum of an infinite series may be finite, if each successive term is enough smaller than the last, and in this case Zeno catches the tortoise after having run 111 1/9 yards.
In my circumstances, the time intervals remained the same but the tasks accomplished got smaller and smaller. First, it was ostensibly the work of an afternoon to obtain my registration, license plates-the whole smash. Then it was the work of an afternoon to obtain just my title. Then an afternoon to obtain a statement that my car wasn't registered in Washington. Then an afternoon to get the goddamn form notarized just to request a statement that my car wasn't registered in Washington. Would I ever get to work a full day again?
From the phone book Kathy found a notary public not too far from work, and graciously picked me up and drove me there. (We were both so eager to get this nightmare over with that it didn't even occur to us to wait until the following morning.) The address we sought belonged to an African-American bookstore, and a virtual shrine to Louis Farrakhan. I was expecting maybe a bank or a library or something like that; it was by far the trippiest notary public's office I'd ever seen. We got all the papers signed and stamped amidst several large displays of exotic oils and perfumes in tiny stoppered flasks. I dreaded the next step, having recently had bad experiences searching for public fax machines. But of course we were in the city this time; the convenience store across the street advertised one. My first break of the entire quest for license plates...maybe....
With everything safely faxed off to Washington, I relaxed for a couple of days, delighted to let the ball be in someone else's court for a change. My temporary license had expired by this time; but I had the rest of the week before I had to use my car, and once I secured my title the rest would follow immediately and effortlessly. (Right?) I spoke to Andrea to make sure everything was in order. She had never received my statement of non-registration from the Washington DMV. Huh? However, Andrea told me that it sometimes takes a couple of days to perform the official check, and so I might be jumping the gun a little. I could readily understand this, given the hours the folks at the Washington title bureau apparently kept. Thus, I waited a couple more days and called again. Still no document from Washington. Now what was wrong? I couldn't imagine what I would have to do this time, and for what even less significant progress toward my goal.
I left work a little early, for the umpteenth time [heh-heh-Microsoft Word's spell checker recognizes umpteenth!], and called the Washington DMV. This time, I got a response after only forty-five minutes. I was learning how to work the system! Turned out that the cruel hand of Fate had intervened when I faxed the request, and had deleted the first page of the form. This page was the one that had all my information, so the title bureau couldn't even contact me to tell me that my form was incomplete. I drove up the street to the local Office Max to resend the fax. There I wound up waiting in line for twenty minutes behind someone who was torturing the copy attendant by having him copy 1583 copies of a church newsletter, each one on a different color of paper. Finally I advanced to the head of the line, only to learn that the fax machine was self-service. Grrrrrrr....
I checked with Andrea the very next day, and lo, the statement of non-registration was already in her hands! I had actually made progress!! It took a few minutes to grasp the implications. Just as a few insignificant molecules of a hormone can trigger a vast change in metabolism, so I expected that finishing this one small step would precipitate an immediate and final resolution to the Quest for License Plates.
However, to finish the job I had to drive to the title bureau-and since Kathy was working by this time, I had to take my car. I expected this to be my Achilles' heel: after all this work, I might get arrested for an expired registration on my way to get my registration. After checking 43 times to make sure I had everything I needed, I attempted to drive as inconspicuously as possible. A huge truck kindly provided cover by following me at about 1/5 car-length distance, so that nobody could see my expired temporary license. Still, I performed a full 360° scan of my surroundings about once every two seconds, looking for the cops that I was sure would pop out of nowhere at the last moment and confiscate my car.
Andrea recognized me instantly and waved me to the head of the line. It turned out that we had to complete several distinct steps to get me a title. First, I had to title the car as an Ohio non-resident. Then I had to transfer the title to myself as an Ohio resident and pay the Ohio tax, because I didn't pay the tax when I bought it. Somewhere in the middle there was a third step, during which the car was officially owned but had no owner. This, of course, is impossible; and I am convinced that if I had looked out into the parking lot anytime during this five-minute period, I'd have seen the car fading in and out of our universe as if it weren't sure which dimension it belonged in.
But eventually, I was presented the title to my car. The paper I had labored so long to acquire was resting, tangibly, in my actual hands. My car belonged to me in the state of Ohio. I held the title over my head in triumph, turning slowly so that people could witness the historic document from every possible angle.
I skipped eight doors down to the licensing office, took my number, waited, and finally slapped my title onto the counter and told the clerk, "There! Now you have to give me my plates!" Uh, not exactly. Because my car had been owned by a nonresident for five minutes, and because it was last titled when it was technically not new, I now had to get an emissions check. My car had four hundred miles on it. I was on my second tank of gas. What, did they think I'd convert the engine to run on sulfur cakes or something?
Remember how I had thought, smugly, that by buying my car new in Ohio I'd circumvent all this crap? I believe the gods have amply punished me for my hubris. I will never again risk offending the automotive deities. Instead of my license plates, I received another 30-day temporary registration.
Off I went, south of town, to get my E-check. Because I had so few miles on the car, the attendant didn't even bother to test my exhaust; he merely plugged a probe into the car's computer to verify that Honda hadn't deviously programmed it to spew pure carbon monoxide. I paid $20 for that. SIGH. But hey, the universe wasn't even fighting back any more. It knew I'd won, through sheer perseverance.
I no longer needed to drive halfway to Pittsburgh to attend to my civic duties. I could complete my registration at the neighborhood DMV on my way to work, on my bike. Now there's one twist to the story I haven't mentioned until now: I wanted a personalized plate. I wanted a personalized plate with a 1 in it; the Arabic numeral "one." So I filled out a form indicating the desired sequence of characters (which I won't divulge here for reasons of anonymity), and in the margin wrote "Numeral 'One'" with an arrow pointing to the 1. When the clerk wrote down the information, she clearly wrote a capital I in place of the 1 I asked her, "Is that a 'one'?" She said yes. I noted that it looked suspiciously like an I, and she reassured me again that it was the numeral 1. She carefully drew my license plate number on the temporary tag I had to display whilst my plates were being manufactured. Her capital I was beautifully rendered, with both crossbars resembling shallow sine waves. Again I asked, "Is that a 'one'?"; and again I received an affirmation. The clerk handed me the computer-printed receipt bearing the characters my license plate was to show. Again, an I. "Sure that's a 'one'?" "Yes." I dropped it; I had to get to work, and there was nothing more I could do but to trust her on it.
Yesterday, November 17, I received the license plates I had toiled nearly eight weeks to obtain. Sure enough, it's an I. As in SIGH.
It must have been the circumstances that made my particular purchase so heinously evil. (I must conclude it was evil; otherwise, why would I be punished so severely? If the punishment really fits the crime, whatever I did must really have been horrible.)
The story begins way back at the end of August. While we were checking out houses to rent in Cleveland, a couple weeks before moving here, I bought a car. It was the perfect time. My Honda Accord has served me faithfully for 17 years, but was beginning to suffer recurrent major failures. Nothing vital-the essential workings were still in fine order; but always something that was (1) perishable and (2) expensive. There didn't seem much point in dragging it 2,500 miles (4,000 km) here, where the extreme weather may have proved too difficult for the poor tired old thing. Anyway, we also had time to go car shopping during our house-hunting visit, and we found a Honda dealership not far from the in-laws' place that was open well into the evening. So, by the time we returned to Seattle, I had a new silver Civic stashed in Kathy's family's driveway.
We began to suffer through Ohio's incredibly tortuous vehicle licensing system a mere three days after completing our cross-country move on September 16. Kathy, who didn't start her job until October 3, slogged through the whole process over two interminable afternoons of standing around in line, accruing vast, angry purple networks of varicose veins, and waiting for her number to be called.
I expected to have a much easier time of it: I'd bought my car in Ohio, and therefore would be exempt from the vehicle identification number (VIN) search, the title change and the emissions check ("E-check"), for each of which Kathy was forced to drive to various well-hidden locales far on the eastern and southern outskirts of the city. I could complete the final required step, obtaining the license plates, at an ordinary licensing office-and we have one of those right up the street from us. I had until Sept. 29 before my 30-day temporary registration expired.
All I can say is this: when I'm wrong, I don't do it halfway.
I took off work a hour and a half early on Sept. 22 to take care of my car registration. By the time I got home, changed, gathered the papers from the sale and hauled over to the licensing office, it was 4:15. Still plenty of time. And to my delight, there was hardly any line, and only one screaming child. (The number of screaming children in any department of motor vehicles varies widely, according to the neighborhood and number of such offices in a given municipality; but there is always at least one. I suppose that in lieu of playing Muzak, the government hires young single mothers to stand around in DMV offices and feed their babies Tabasco. It's sort of a public service. Personally, I'd prefer the Muzak. I might fall asleep whilst standing in line, but at least I'd escape with my blood uncurdled.)
I quickly advanced to the head of the line and presented to the nice lady at the desk every piece of official-looking paper I obtained while purchasing my car. She asked me where the car title was. "Should I have received one?" I asked. Well, apparently, yes. I realized that the dealership had probably sent my title to my old address. Still, long before this time it should have arrived at our new address through forwarding. Instead of waiting for the title to get forwarded to me, the lady said, I should go ahead and obtain a duplicate title. Unfortunately, the nearest title office is ten minutes' drive away, and they close at 4:30. What time is it now? 4:21. It figures.
(My original title never did reach us. I've noticed that while all the junk mail sent to our old address zips through the forward without a millisecond's delay, all the important mail gets snagged somewhere in the process, and may take a week or two to free itself. And, of course, really important mail, like my car title, gets sucked into the insatiable maw of the Dead Letter Department. By now that title is not only dead, it's fossilized.
I spent the rest of my business day attempting to secure a checking account. Everything went swimmingly until the bank's computer noticed I had a decent credit rating, and therefore required the teller to offer me trillions of dollars' worth of credit I didn't need. When I declined this credit, the computer was so surprised that I would refuse an opportunity to consume, consume, consume that it locked up. It took thirty minutes and the bank's entire staff to get it working again. And when I used an out-of-state driver's license as identification, the computer, still weak from the earlier trauma, locked up again. My teller wound up completing my paperwork on actual paper. I was there an hour and a half. I arrived home thoroughly starved and overstressed.
It seemed that I'd have to visit the title department after all. Again I left work early, by two hours this time, and made the long drive out east. Ideally, I could take care of the title and the other registration issues all in one trip. At this location, an anonymous suburban strip mall, a regular car registration office was just a few doors down from the title office. The obligatory screaming baby in this branch was so loud and shrill that the mother was getting hostile looks from the majority of the clientele. She stepped outside with her screech owl for a few minutes, so that briefly, the office contained no screaming children(!!!); but she returned before the universe had a chance to collapse in on itself as a result of the violation of natural law. Since the line operated on the "take-a-number" principle, I carefully situated myself on whatever side of the door the baby wasn't, and watched through the glass wall (when I was outside) and past the cringing patrons for my number to come up. Up it did, in fact, come, and I soon found myself talking to another nice lady, by the name of Andrea.
Andrea and I would become fast friends over the following couple of weeks. Thrown together by cruel fate, we would form the special fraternal bond of people who have survived a long trial by working together against incredible odds. She was no more to blame for what would follow than I. Both of us were the unwilling victims of an immense, unfeeling bureaucracy that chews up the souls of humankind and spits them out, broken and bleeding, onto the asphalt.
But that was later. For now, she looked at all the papers I'd brought, and noticed that I did not have any record that I had paid for the car in full. Evidently I could not obtain a new title until the financial status of the car was known unequivocally. Thus, I had to call the dealership and ask them to fax Andrea a bill of sale saying that the car was paid for. But I couldn't do that right then, because somehow none of the documents I had on me bore the seller's phone number, and the title office had officially closed by this time, anyway. Calling the dealership that evening revealed that the title, with near-perfect timing, had been mailed out the same day we set out from Seattle in the moving van. Oh SIGH. I negotiated with the sales department to fax a copy of the bill of sale, showing that I'd paid for the car in full, to Andrea at the title office.
The next day (Sept. 27), I called Andrea early in the afternoon to make sure the bill of sale had arrived-you know, so I wouldn't take off from work early and drive all the way out there again for no reason. It had, but for some reason it did not state anywhere that the car was paid for. I gave the dealership another ring, and within an hour or two, verified that this time they had gotten it right. Off I went yet again. This time I felt confident. This time for sure!
I handed my paperwork to Andrea and waited expectantly for my new car title. She checked the bill of sale. No problem there. Then she said that she needed to call the Washington title bureau to make sure that my car hadn't been titled in Washington. After all, I was a Washington resident when I bought it, so it could have happened. We both knew better, but by Ohio law she had to call anyway, as a formality. She found the number for the Washington title bureau in this big listing of US state DMVs that she had lying around for some reason, and gave them a call. Sure enough, it was quickly verified that my vehicle was not registered in Washington. Andrea tried to enter that piece of information into my account, but the computer beeped and flashed some ominous warning at her. She informed me with great regret what the computer had just told her: that a verbal confirmation was insufficient to establish lack of registration in Washington. I would need a written confirmation. What's worse, according to whatever bizarre privacy laws that allowed her to obtain information from the Washington bureau but not to use that information in any useful way, I would need to request the written confirmation in person.
Luckily, I could still call the Washington title bureau when I got home, even though the business day had come to a close in Cleveland. (The three-hour time difference comes in handy on occasion.) Yet I still had to leave a message, which was not returned that day. I concluded that the staff had already gone home for the day. Remember back when banks were only open from 10 to 3? Well, the Washington title bureau must be where people work who can't handle the grueling, career-driven schedule of a 10-to-3 banker. The last time I got home from work by 1:00 PM, I was in kindergarten.
I asked Kathy to try calling again after 8:00 the next morning, Pacific Time (I can't call long-distance from my cubicle), and to ask them to ring me at work. As the afternoon dragged on, I began to wonder whether it would be easier just to fly to Seattle and camp out at the entrance of the Ballard licensing bureau so that I'd be ready and waiting when the place decided to open for a few minutes. Turned out I was overly pessimistic; I got the call a mere three hours after Kathy had left her follow-up message. I learned that the bureau wouldn't hand out certificates of non-registration to just anyone who asked for one over the telephone. Nosiree-Bob, I had to download a written form from the Web, fill it out, get it notarized (!!!), and fax it to them, with the special request that they fax the form to Andrea.
Can you see why I started thinking of this project as the Many-headed Hydra? Each time I solved one problem, or evaded one obstruction, two more would immediately spring forth to take its place. The analogy is apt in one other respect: you'll recall that defeating the Hydra was one of the twelve tasks of Hercules, appointed him for an unavoidable but serious offense against the gods. Just like Hercules, I've committed the unforgivable offense of buying a car, and now I was to complete this Herculean task as penance. And just as Hercules would never have completed the task without his nephew Iolaus there to cauterize the Hydra's severed necks, I would never have succeeded without Kathy ferrying me about and making and taking calls at home.
I also thought of my predicament as "Zeno's License Plates." The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno described an apparent paradox in the form of a race between Achilles and a tortoise. The tortoise is given a 100-yard lead. At the sound of the gun (or the bow and arrow, or whatever the Greeks used to start races with) Achilles quickly covers the 100 yards; but in the time he takes to run that distance, the tortoise has plodded 10 yards along. Now Achilles has 10 yards to catch up, and he swiftly travels that distance; but in the meantime the tortoise has moved forward 1 yard. And so on, ad infinitum. Zeno claimed that Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, because every time he covers the distance between where he is now and where the tortoise is now, the tortoise has managed to advance another, smaller distance. We now know better: the sum of an infinite series may be finite, if each successive term is enough smaller than the last, and in this case Zeno catches the tortoise after having run 111 1/9 yards.
In my circumstances, the time intervals remained the same but the tasks accomplished got smaller and smaller. First, it was ostensibly the work of an afternoon to obtain my registration, license plates-the whole smash. Then it was the work of an afternoon to obtain just my title. Then an afternoon to obtain a statement that my car wasn't registered in Washington. Then an afternoon to get the goddamn form notarized just to request a statement that my car wasn't registered in Washington. Would I ever get to work a full day again?
From the phone book Kathy found a notary public not too far from work, and graciously picked me up and drove me there. (We were both so eager to get this nightmare over with that it didn't even occur to us to wait until the following morning.) The address we sought belonged to an African-American bookstore, and a virtual shrine to Louis Farrakhan. I was expecting maybe a bank or a library or something like that; it was by far the trippiest notary public's office I'd ever seen. We got all the papers signed and stamped amidst several large displays of exotic oils and perfumes in tiny stoppered flasks. I dreaded the next step, having recently had bad experiences searching for public fax machines. But of course we were in the city this time; the convenience store across the street advertised one. My first break of the entire quest for license plates...maybe....
With everything safely faxed off to Washington, I relaxed for a couple of days, delighted to let the ball be in someone else's court for a change. My temporary license had expired by this time; but I had the rest of the week before I had to use my car, and once I secured my title the rest would follow immediately and effortlessly. (Right?) I spoke to Andrea to make sure everything was in order. She had never received my statement of non-registration from the Washington DMV. Huh? However, Andrea told me that it sometimes takes a couple of days to perform the official check, and so I might be jumping the gun a little. I could readily understand this, given the hours the folks at the Washington title bureau apparently kept. Thus, I waited a couple more days and called again. Still no document from Washington. Now what was wrong? I couldn't imagine what I would have to do this time, and for what even less significant progress toward my goal.
I left work a little early, for the umpteenth time [heh-heh-Microsoft Word's spell checker recognizes umpteenth!], and called the Washington DMV. This time, I got a response after only forty-five minutes. I was learning how to work the system! Turned out that the cruel hand of Fate had intervened when I faxed the request, and had deleted the first page of the form. This page was the one that had all my information, so the title bureau couldn't even contact me to tell me that my form was incomplete. I drove up the street to the local Office Max to resend the fax. There I wound up waiting in line for twenty minutes behind someone who was torturing the copy attendant by having him copy 1583 copies of a church newsletter, each one on a different color of paper. Finally I advanced to the head of the line, only to learn that the fax machine was self-service. Grrrrrrr....
I checked with Andrea the very next day, and lo, the statement of non-registration was already in her hands! I had actually made progress!! It took a few minutes to grasp the implications. Just as a few insignificant molecules of a hormone can trigger a vast change in metabolism, so I expected that finishing this one small step would precipitate an immediate and final resolution to the Quest for License Plates.
However, to finish the job I had to drive to the title bureau-and since Kathy was working by this time, I had to take my car. I expected this to be my Achilles' heel: after all this work, I might get arrested for an expired registration on my way to get my registration. After checking 43 times to make sure I had everything I needed, I attempted to drive as inconspicuously as possible. A huge truck kindly provided cover by following me at about 1/5 car-length distance, so that nobody could see my expired temporary license. Still, I performed a full 360° scan of my surroundings about once every two seconds, looking for the cops that I was sure would pop out of nowhere at the last moment and confiscate my car.
Andrea recognized me instantly and waved me to the head of the line. It turned out that we had to complete several distinct steps to get me a title. First, I had to title the car as an Ohio non-resident. Then I had to transfer the title to myself as an Ohio resident and pay the Ohio tax, because I didn't pay the tax when I bought it. Somewhere in the middle there was a third step, during which the car was officially owned but had no owner. This, of course, is impossible; and I am convinced that if I had looked out into the parking lot anytime during this five-minute period, I'd have seen the car fading in and out of our universe as if it weren't sure which dimension it belonged in.
But eventually, I was presented the title to my car. The paper I had labored so long to acquire was resting, tangibly, in my actual hands. My car belonged to me in the state of Ohio. I held the title over my head in triumph, turning slowly so that people could witness the historic document from every possible angle.
I skipped eight doors down to the licensing office, took my number, waited, and finally slapped my title onto the counter and told the clerk, "There! Now you have to give me my plates!" Uh, not exactly. Because my car had been owned by a nonresident for five minutes, and because it was last titled when it was technically not new, I now had to get an emissions check. My car had four hundred miles on it. I was on my second tank of gas. What, did they think I'd convert the engine to run on sulfur cakes or something?
Remember how I had thought, smugly, that by buying my car new in Ohio I'd circumvent all this crap? I believe the gods have amply punished me for my hubris. I will never again risk offending the automotive deities. Instead of my license plates, I received another 30-day temporary registration.
Off I went, south of town, to get my E-check. Because I had so few miles on the car, the attendant didn't even bother to test my exhaust; he merely plugged a probe into the car's computer to verify that Honda hadn't deviously programmed it to spew pure carbon monoxide. I paid $20 for that. SIGH. But hey, the universe wasn't even fighting back any more. It knew I'd won, through sheer perseverance.
I no longer needed to drive halfway to Pittsburgh to attend to my civic duties. I could complete my registration at the neighborhood DMV on my way to work, on my bike. Now there's one twist to the story I haven't mentioned until now: I wanted a personalized plate. I wanted a personalized plate with a 1 in it; the Arabic numeral "one." So I filled out a form indicating the desired sequence of characters (which I won't divulge here for reasons of anonymity), and in the margin wrote "Numeral 'One'" with an arrow pointing to the 1. When the clerk wrote down the information, she clearly wrote a capital I in place of the 1 I asked her, "Is that a 'one'?" She said yes. I noted that it looked suspiciously like an I, and she reassured me again that it was the numeral 1. She carefully drew my license plate number on the temporary tag I had to display whilst my plates were being manufactured. Her capital I was beautifully rendered, with both crossbars resembling shallow sine waves. Again I asked, "Is that a 'one'?"; and again I received an affirmation. The clerk handed me the computer-printed receipt bearing the characters my license plate was to show. Again, an I. "Sure that's a 'one'?" "Yes." I dropped it; I had to get to work, and there was nothing more I could do but to trust her on it.
Yesterday, November 17, I received the license plates I had toiled nearly eight weeks to obtain. Sure enough, it's an I. As in SIGH.