How Frustrating is the DMV, Guys?

Austin Film Festival countdown: 3 days.

Awesome, I’m excited to go, except not, because — I’m sure I’ve covered this in other posts — PACKING ANXIETY.

Sometimes I’m late because I don’t want to go to things.  But mostly I’m late because I don’t want to get ready to go.  I find making getting-ready-to-go decisions  stressful, so I put them off.  I set aside entire evenings to pack, and then I don’t pack, like this evening.  Although, in my defense, part of this evening’s non-packing activities were, in fact, packing-related.

I was actually doing really well with the packing, because I went to Indiana last weekend, where it was fall-type weather, and my clothes for that worked out fine, so my plan was, do a load of laundry, and then just dump all the same stuff back in my suitcase.  It would have worked, too, except…

I found out this morning it is likely to RAIN… for three of the four days that I will be staying at the hotel that is a 15-minute walk to the main festival site, “if you take the path.” The PATH.  I’m not even sure if  the word PATH  implies a sidewalk. It might. Or might not. So clearly, that hour spent researching and ordering galoshes and a rain poncho should warrant some packing credit.  But as  you can imagine, all the color-picking and review-comparing used up a good portion of my very finite decision-making reserves. I needed to replenish eating bowls of cereal and wandering idly through the house looking through random piles of clutter.

One of these piles had a lot of envelopes I hadn’t yet seen, probably from while I was gone last week. One of the envelopes was from the DMV saying my drivers license renewal is due.  Clearly, the time to take care of that should be NOW, because, you know, NOT PACKING ANYWAY.  So I went to the site, where I had to create an account, with a username and a password and FIVE security questions, which, to my mind, is a lot of questions, especially since anyone who stole my purse could be making the account with their own questions anyway, but whatever, I like convenience so I’m not complaining…about that.

I’m complaining because the questions are really hard!

Here’s the first one: “The name of your favorite niece/nephew.”
What? First, I’m supposed to pick favorites? That’s  mean! And because of how the question is phrased, I also have to remember — in FOUR YEARS when I do this again — whether I even picked a niece or a nephew.  And four years is a long time to harbor a favoritism. In that amount of time kids can get so obnoxious that you don’t even remember liking them at all, much less having a favorite.

In general, the DMV has too many “favorite” questions: “Favorite person in history.” “Favorite teacher OR professor.” “Last name of your favorite author.”  Why does everything have to be a competition? Does everyone out there have a favorite historical figure but me?

Some of the other questions :”Who is the star athlete of your high school?” (Yes, present tense…although putting it past tense wouldn’t help.) “On what street is your grocery store?” What is the last name of your family physician.”  I get it, these are easy questions… if you’re a character from Friday Night Lights and live in Dillon, Texas. If you are me, living in a city, you have no idea what “your high school” even is, you frequent at least three grocery stores, and every time you call to make an appointment, the doctor you met  last time and kind of liked has moved on.

In the end, I managed to answer five questions, but the answers were not ones I could trust myself to remember, so I had to document them, which, I’m told, kind of defeats the purpose, but whatever.  I won’t tell you exactly where I documented them, but I will say it was in close proximity to the username and password I also had to document.

But after all the that, it turns out my username was “taken,” so they reset the ENTIRE PAGE and let me try again.  And again.  It doesn’t tell you up front the name is taken, you have to fill out the whole page and submit it to find out, As many times as it takes — they’ve got all night, bub.

Apparently, since I’m writing this instead of packing, so do I.