School Board President Steve Gourley likely will disagree, but visiting the Dept. of Motor Vehicles on Washington Boulevard these overcast early summer mornings is nearly as pleasant as a shopping outing to WestfieldCulver City, the Fox Hills Mall.
I am here to praise them.
The DMV, in spite of Mr. Gourley’s sandpaper experience in Sacramento when Arnold came into office, is a cool place to unlax if you must do business with a government bureaucracy.
With a sense of dread that would have impressed an elephant en route to a slaughter house on the grounds of the Junior League for the Blind, I spent a month developing internal tension over this morning’s businesslike visit to the DMV. I remembered it being as chaotic in the Ellis Island Room as the gathering disarray of the Obama administration.
It Ain’t a Best Seller
In early June, I stopped by the always-teeming Washington office for a copy of the English language version of the California Driver Handbook, all 94 dry pages. I knew I was in the right place because I had to park a healthy distance from the grounds and thread through a nondescript crowd that would have filled Dodger Stadium.
For the next 30 days, when stopped at intersections or during time outs in the Emergency Reading Rooms at home, I glanced peripherally at the book, in quest of creative new rules.
When I dialed for an appointment, the soonest the DMV could meet my request was nine days past my deadline. But if I drove to Barstow, there was an opening four days after my deadline.
My wife, the humorist in our home, assured me that if I arrived an hour before the opening, I not only would be first in line but fast grow lonesome. Swirling into the Washington office’s parking lot 70 minutes ahead of the opening bell, I was a mere 90th in a line wrapping around the building.
I may not have been among friends, but fully two or three people spoke my native language. And a young lady just ahead of me was a recent speaker at a Culver City Democratic Club meeting, from the St. Joseph Center, I believe.
Without drowning you in minutiae, I completed a hefty chunk of my present book, concerning the women in Hemingway’s life, during the 85 patient minutes before we entered the Ellis Island Room.
Staff Hugely Upgraded
Once inside, the orderly overflow line moved with dazzling efficiency. This was going to be a four-window visit. The first young woman was a model of succinct, courteous, unassailable manner.
But the prize winner was a gentleman named Cullen, whose poetry you may soon be dreading here. He could teach etiquette to Ms. Manners and customer congeniality to Warren Buffett.
In the old days, prior to this morning, I thought the television show “Desperate Housewives” had borrowed its name from the DMV staff. Mostly female, they seemed chronically kvetchy if not hung over, aching with anger since high school, most recently because their saintly husbands had evicted them an hour ago.
Not these days at the DMV.
The semi-final stop, for the driver license camera lady, almost became a boondoggle when I explained that my cap remains on at all times, even indoors, even if I had not signed an obscure document on my last DMV visit years ago and fastidiously retained it in my wallet in case I ever accidentally encountered a camera lady from the government.
However, when she understood that I was resolute, she responded deftly, politely and without a trace of grudge. She did, however, insist that I remove my eyeglasses. She did not blanch when I said since I only had worn them for 30 years, her request met the minimal conditions for satisfying a demanding logician.
The final and payoff window was manned by a man and woman who obviously enjoyed working together. He reminded me of former LASSPD Chief Bernard Parks. She strongly resembled my aunt who died the other afternoon, with rather a coquettish sense of humor.
Somewhere in that melting-pot mix of disarmingly charming social soup, my tensions must have abstractly died of drowning. When I smilingly walked out of the Ellis Island Room less than an hour after the DMV had opened, I was whistling the tune of a surprisingly contented customer.
