{"id":106,"date":"2011-01-21T07:32:08","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T06:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/?p=106"},"modified":"2011-01-21T07:32:08","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T06:32:08","slug":"adventures-at-the-dmv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/?p=106","title":{"rendered":"Adventures at the DMV"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even though I have watched American TV and movies pretty much all my life I have noticed that there are some jokes that have passed me by before that I now start to understand. One is all the references to &#8220;the DMV&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>DMV is the &#8220;Department of Motor Vehicles&#8221; here in California. It&#8217;s the place you go to for drivers licensed and car registrations. I&#8217;m sure other states have similar institutions but since Hollywood is in California most jokes are about the California DMV.<\/p>\n<p>DMV is notorious for having ridiculously long waiting times, being hard to reach on the phone and having staff in a constant bad mood. Like in this TV commercial:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LhukXw9cU8c\" frameborder=\"0\" allowFullScreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately I am not done dealing with the DMV.. Here is what has happened so far.<\/p>\n<p>After passing the written test for a drivers license I got an appointment for a drivers test. Unfortunately I realized I couldn&#8217;t make it on that day so I needed to reschedule. On their web site you&#8217;re supposed to be able cancel appointments and booking new ones. Canceling worked fine, but booking a new one didn&#8217;t work for some reason. I needed to call them.<\/p>\n<p>When calling the DMV you get to an automated voice phone system. Navigating through all the questions to book a drivers test appointment takes a couple of minutes. But at the end I always got the answer that &#8220;the system is not available at this time. Try again later.&#8221; After a few attempts I learned that I could say &#8220;speak to a technician&#8221; to request to speak to a real human being. The problem was only that I got put in a telephone queue without any idea how long that would take. In the end I got some help from my settling in guide Jane to get through to them and make the appointment.<\/p>\n<p>Now the problem was that I managed the fail the drivers test.. I&#8217;m not going to go into any details here but it took me about 10 seconds of driving to fail it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>So I needed to book a new appointment.. I also needed to\u00a0 extend the temporary drivers license I got when passing the written test (since I had a foreign drivers license) so I can continue to drive in the mean time. So I had to make a visit to a DMV office in person.<\/p>\n<p>On the first weekday of 2011 I headed out to Los Gatos and the DMV office. (I was off from work that day.) That turned out to be a pretty bad day to go there. The first thing you do at the DMV office is to go to a counter and tell what errand you have. Then you are given a queue ticket with a different letter depending on your errand. I got a &#8220;G&#8221; ticket and there was about 40 numbers ahead of me.<\/p>\n<p>After one and a half hour of waiting seven G numbers had been called. Although the B numbers were even worse and one lady were complaining loudly to the manager that no B numbers were called. (Which actually seemed to help, at least temporarily.)<\/p>\n<p>I was hoping that after a while a bunch of G ticket people would be missing because they had gone home and it would go a bit faster. But when waiting I had realized that I hadn&#8217;t brought my passport. I wasn&#8217;t sure if I needed the passport but I&#8217;d hate to wait for hours and then just be told that I needed my passport. So I thought it should be pretty safe to go home and get it and come back before my number was called. It would take about 45 minutes to get home again.<\/p>\n<p>But what do you know&#8230; when I got back I had just missed my number. So I gave up on DMV that day and decided to go there really early the next day instead. Before I went to work.<\/p>\n<p>The DMV office opens at 8 am and at 7:30 am the next day I parked my car outside the office. I wasn&#8217;t the first one there. Two other guys were waiting in their cars as well. After a while more people turned up and we formed a line outside the door. When it was 8 am there were probably 20-30 persons standing in line. It seems that this is the case most days because a couple of minutes before the doors opened a DMV worker handed out queue tickets to the people in the line. They had a routine for this.<\/p>\n<p>Once the doors opened I didn&#8217;t have to wait for my number. I was directly sent to a window. Behind the counter a grumpy lady asked in her best morning voice &#8220;Hi, what are you here for?&#8221; I explained what I wanted and the lady tried to start up her computer. That didn&#8217;t go very well and after a while I was sent to a different window.<\/p>\n<p>There I explained\u00a0 what I wanted to a different lady. When she looked up my file in the computer she realized that I had failed a test and started to suggest that she couldn&#8217;t extend my temporary license because of this. She was mumbling things like &#8220;we don&#8217;t know if you can drive&#8221; and things like that, but continued to type on the computer and finally handed over an extended temporary license to me. Go figure&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the registration of my car did go smoothly and a couple of days ago I received a small package in the mail from the DMV with my license plates!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/licenseplate1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-107\" title=\"licenseplate1\" src=\"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/licenseplate1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"816\" height=\"612\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/licenseplate2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-108\" title=\"licenseplate2\" src=\"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/licenseplate2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"816\" height=\"612\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even though I have watched American TV and movies pretty much all my life I have noticed that there are some jokes that have passed me by before that I now start to understand. One is all the references to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/?p=106\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}