Patrick and I were both unexpectedly off yesterday, so even though I had a few things I had to do, we decided to quickly go get our drivers licenses since it was the first time we were both off when the DMV was open.

I knew that things like that can end up taking awhile, but I never imagined it be 5 or 6 hours! First we went to the Jersey City DMV and despite long lines and a gruff receptionist, things were moving along quickly. I only had one small complaint– that I had to fill out the exact same form 2 times, with a comment to Patrick about carbon paper being very useful.

We had numbers 77 (Patrick) and 79 (me). And as I said things were moving along quickly. That is until they called number 76 and then it was eons before we ever got to 77. Patrick went up to window number one and I waited a few minutes until it was my turn. And when I was called to window number 6 I proceed to the quickest route there, not being able to see that to continue the way I was going I’d be walking in front of someone getting their photo taken. Hey, I’d never been there before, there was a wall up and I couldn’t see that. So I stopped and was going to wait the two seconds it would have taken for them to finish when the lady who was going to help me barked at me to go around!

So I went around, feeling dumb. And when she asked me to sign here, she pointed at what I thought was a piece of paper I had handed her so I reached for a pen and was about to sign when she informed me that I needed to be signing the little keypad thing. Ok, again I felt dumb, but I did it. And she kept making me start over. It wasn’t until the third time that she finally told me what I was doing wrong, my knuckles where apparently hitting the screen. So by this time I’m feeling about 2 inches tall and it’s time for my picture. Needless to say I’m not smiling very big!

So I go over to the line behind the blue ropes where I’ve been instructed to go and Patrick is coming towards me saying no, we are leaving. He explains to me that because we are doing an out of state transfer, and their computer is broken, they can’t finish ours today. We’ve been there for 2 hours at this point. We’ve gone through many check points and at each one told them exactly what we were doing, and no one had said a word about not being able to help us. You’d think they’d want to post a sign or something.

We were directed to the closest place that was open “late,” meaning after 4:30, that could help us. Patrick tried to explain to the man that if he gave us the physical address of the place our car’s navigation system could get us there, but the man would have none of that and just kept giving Patrick directions.

So we follow the directions, which have no sings of streets or distances and somehow find the spot despite it being much further away than the man had implied. We explain to the people at the front what had happened and we get rushed to a special line, which we somehow took to mean we’d be processed faster. No such luck. We were handed numbers 136 and 137 just as we heard the call for number 80!

We groaningly took our seats and waited our turn. When they finally reached our number we go to another line and sit and wait. But this line moves fast. We come across our first person with any personality whatsoever when we get to the front of this line. But then we are knocked down again when she tells us they sent us to the wrong line, we should have gone to have a vision test first…And we’ve already been through 4 people who neglected to direct us to the right place.

Thankfully she tells us to come directly back to her when we are done. After waiting a short time through the vision test line, we finish and proceed back on our way to purple lady as we dubbed her. The lady at the front of the room didn’t want to let us through but we were having none of that….So we skipped on through to the front of the line and in two seconds had our NJ DL’s two hours after arriving at the second location.

We were going to have to go Clark Griswald at Wally World if they didn’t get us straightened out pretty soon! With travel and wait time it was about 5 hours….and a lot of traffic.