This is a
true story. Well, it's based on a true
story. It perhaps has an exaggeration or
two, but...well, it's a mostly true story.
(Cue the "Law and Order" music - DUN DUN!!!!)
My daughter
finished Driver's Ed and had been driving with her permit for about a YEAR and
we were ready to take the FINAL road test and get her license. Now, I remember going at lunch time ON MY
BIRTHDAY when I turned 16. I took the
test and still had time to go through the Arby's drive thru on my way back to
school. No joke. But, as parents always like to
say...."Times have changed since I was a kid!!!" What follows is my rendition of our trip
to.... the Department of Public Safety or as I will commonly refer to it -
Hades.
All my
friends had given me SO MUCH wonderful advice on Facebook. Seriously - I love my online friends and they
had great advice. Somehow, Friend A just "walked on in"
to this office and was out in 20 minutes!
Friend B arrived VERY early to
the SUPERCENTER, and was one of the first 10 "Walk-ins" so they were
in and out quickly. Apparently, I am
everyone's Friend C because I didn't have
this happy-happy - joy-joy- skip- into- the- office- with- a- basket- of- goodies-
and- come- out- with- a- shiny- new- driver's- license- for- my- daughter
experience. Let me tell you about it.
It began on
the phone - not talking to anyone mind you - just listening to ringing, busy
signals and a WONDERFUL system that tells you to press this and press that and
then transfers you to an office in Botswana that is only open on Thursday
mornings when the moon is full in a leap year.
Soooo... I decided to follow the lead of one friend who took her
daughter to the small town of Gainesville, TX and just do a walk-in test. Sounds so easy, right?
We drive the
hour north, just below the Oklahoma border and find the DPS office. We go in and every chair is full with people stacked
on each other like fish in a barrel. Well...perhaps
a slight exaggeration. We take a paper number from the number
machine and lean against the wall, trying to look casual with everyone facing
you looking as bored as if - well...as
if they were at the DPS office! Finally,
a lady comes out with a clipboard!
Now, I am a
HUGE follower of clipboards. I believe
that someone with a clipboard = someone with authority. I LOVE when I, myself, have a clipboard. POWER!!!!
So I, of course, went up to clipboard lady and asked if we were in the
right place to wait for the road test.
"Oh, we don't take walk-ins anymore," she says with a cackle
in her voice and an evil gleam in her eye!
I think I even heard snakes hissing behind the counter in agreement and
pleasure at my chagrinned face.
She then tells me that perhaps a 'third party tester' would be better for us, i.e. pay
$100 and let someone else do the job the government trained her office to
do.
I smile -
probably the fakest I've ever mustered - thanked her and turned to walk
away. I could feel tears of frustration
already coming and my daughter was great, telling me it's all good, I don't
care, etc. After a few choice complaints
about "The Man" holding us down, we left to drive the hour back
home. On the way, we called the Garland SUPERCENTER and listened to the outgoing message.
The recording asked if I wanted to get in line over the phone so I didn't have to
wait at their office! HERE was the
happy-happy-joy-joy!!! I could wait at
my house (or in this case, driving back through the top of Texas) and they
would let me know when I should come up!
HOORAH!!! (This is sarcastic
foreshadowing, folks. Any literary
scholar can tell you that.)
I kid you
not, here's the recording to get in line:
If you're calling for directions or
the address, press one. If you're
calling for information about vehicle registration, press two.
If you are calling to obtain a first time driver's license, press 3.
With sheer, triumphant elation I pressed three like nobody has EVER
pressed three before!!!
The recording then said (and
I SWEAR I heard snickering from the recording..) Thank you. There are 82 people in line ahead of
you. Your wait time is approximately 140
minutes. We will notify you as your time
gets closer. Yep. 82.
But 140 minutes wasn't bad! We
could drive home, pick up my mom and still make it to Grand Prairie to the
SUPERCENTER in time for our arrival at the supreme DPS Royal Court Area of Licenses.
So...we drove
to Grand Prairie and I realize I never pressed one to get the address. We pulled off the highway (because of course,
I'm demonstrating GREAT driving to my almost-independently-driving-daughter)
and I called back. This time, I press
one.
It's hard to
describe the utter feeling of gloom that swept over my entire being as I heard
the recording NOT say SUPERCENTER in Grand Prairie, Tx, but instead, GARLAND,
TX. OH SWEET MERCY!!!! I have mixed up the "G-A-R"s in the
name of the city and in my frustration, didn't listen closely to the
location. We are close to Six Flags and
the Texas Rangers' own ballpark. The
SUPERCENTER is not. It is far. Far away in another land.
Once again,
my daughter tries to soothe me and tell me we can do it another day. I know, however, she's nervous and just
trying to get out of it and by now, I'm more determined than ever to get her to
the DPS office! The recording tells us
we still have 45 minutes and my GPS tells me we are only 34 minutes away. Off
we go!
It's
somewhere around DFW airport that the laughter begins to take over my
body. I sound like a cross between Jack
Nicholson in the Shining and Snoopy and I just can't stop laughing. Tears begin to fall down my face and my mom,
from the backseat, says to my daughter, "Uh-oh...I think you're mom's slipped
over the edge." My daughter looks
at me like only a teenager can - you know the look - as if someone just asked
her the square root of 5,467 and she doesn't want to do it.
SO - we go the 34 minutes - a little longer because of course
by now, we were running out of gas and had to stop - and we finally arrive at
the GARLAND SUPERCENTER Texas DPS. I see
rays of sunshine shooting out of the roof and hear John Williams-esque music loudly
playing in my head. We're HERE! And we are IN LINE!!!!
We all three
walk in the front door with the confident air of your average peacock and walk
up to - you guessed it - a man with a CLIPBOARD! Recognizing and bowing to the power of the
clipboard, I smile up at him with the hope of a newborn baby with the future
ahead of her. He looks at me and says in
a low, menacing, 'James Earle Jones gone bad' voice, "Are you in line by
phone?" I look at him with utter
pride, stood up straight and said... "YES!" "For what?" he says.
"Please sir...if it pleases the
court....my daughter wishes to obtain a license to drive." And he
literally looks at me with more pity than I deserved (because remember, the
extra trip to Grand Prairie was totally my fault) and says...."We don't
take walk-ins."
"WHAT?!" I shriek, turning a few heads. "But...I pressed THREE! I pressed it perfectly! I pressed it with panache! I pressed it with
FLAIR! It said it was for first time
driver's licenses!"
The man
looked at me as one would look at a victim of a shark attack and said
"That's for permits, not licenses."
I didn't hear much of what he said after that because as my mom had
foretold - I was over the edge. The
SUPERCENTER did not live up to it's name.
It was NOT SUPER. I'm not sure it
was even an actual CENTER of anything!
As I worked
to hold back tears of so many emotions I couldn't count, he was saying
something to me about doing "third party testing" just like the lady
in Gainesville. It must be a phrase
that's part of the Clipboard Training Program they attend.
Well, in an
effort to shorten this up a bit more, I'll summarize the next parts of the
saga. We got a call from one of the many
numbers we had tried , saying that they had a cancellation for the road test
and would we like to take the spot? I
said "Yes!" not even caring when it was, so we went the next day and
paid $75...at a third party tester. I TOLD you the power of
the Clipboard, prophesy and all!
Even taking
the test in the RAIN, my daughter passed with somewhat flying colors (parallel
parking is a challenge for most humans in history). The next day, we would go BACK to the DPS to
obtain the actual printed license. I
shuddered at the thought.
THIS TIME,
wise to the schemes and plots of the DPS underworld, I told her we'd be getting
up at 6:00 am to get in line. She looked
at me again with that same look, but didn't argue. We took our lawn chairs and were at the door
of the local DPS by 6:20 am. Alone. We had some nice chat time and watched the
sun rise over the government building that held the final quest for the
driver's license holy grail.
The next
people arrived at 6:40, then 6:45 and we all began to chat and bond over our various
reasons for sitting on a sidewalk waiting for Hades to open its doors. By 7:55 before it opened, there - and this is
NO exaggeration - were about 75 people in line!
I felt so brilliant! I felt so
wise! I felt like perhaps I had earned
my very OWN clipboard of power with my decision to camp out.
I leaned over to my daughter and whispered,
"When we go inside, it's on the second floor. You break right, I'll break left and one of
us will go the right direction. We can't
let ANYONE get in our way of this final quest." (Cue 'The Look' again.)
At precisely
8:00 am, the hope to which I had clung for two days began to peek out again as
the security guard came to unlock the gates of The Unknown. Before allowing us entry, she said in the
voice of an angel, "If you're going to the Driver's License Department,
turn left at the top of the stairs."
LEFT! LEFT! We didn't have to race, split up and strategize. She was giving us our final challenge!
I am proud
to say that I did NOT run over anyone, push any children or yell anything to
anyone as I briskly walked up the stairs and remained the FIRST ONE IN this now
enormous line.
And I tell
you.... after a little paperwork, a fingerprint scan and me paying a little
more money, she handed my daughter her license. I looked at
the clerk with the look of a parched man seeing a mirage. "Really?" I ask.
"That's all?" I wanted
to climb across the desk and hug her, but I remembered the hissing snakes
behind the desk in Gainesville and figured they probably had their own security
team somewhere, so I simply said "Thank you."
I walked out
into the morning light, only 18 minutes after we'd walked in. It was
glorious. We had succeeded. We....were...victorious! I could swear I heard the John Williams-esque
theme song to our escapade start up again and thought about how I was
DONE! FINISHED! NO MORE!
Then it hit me - like a ton of bricks. I have
another daughter. To quote the great
theologian, Yoda, "There is another."
So I called
and scheduled her road test appointment for March, 2021.
Copyright 2016
Permission to use any portion
of this blog should be obtained
from the author.
