WTF, DMV ?

By Brae Canlen 

This is an ode to the California Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV), an agency much maligned by people who use it. It’s also an early obituary; the astute observer will have already seen the signs of its oncoming demise.

When I approached the Hillcrest DMV to replace a lost driver’s license, it looked like business as usual. The things I love most about the place hadn’t changed. The chronically unemployed were sitting in plastic chairs next to the day traders, the newly retired with fresh bus passes, and the moms with fussy babies. (I have yet to figure out how billionaires avoid the DMV, but I’m pretty sure they do.)

In a world of growing social chasms, the DMV is one of the last great levelers of society, an unparalleled cross section of San Diego. Occupy any chair for 15 minutes and let the masses –washed, unwashed, and cell-phoned– swirl around you.

And every person from every stratum gets the same level of service. DMV employees have long had a reputation for being indolent and cranky. But I have found the opposite to be true. Most make an effort to be helpful. (Except for the security guard at the door, of course.)

But what they can’t cancel out, no matter how hard they try, is their fatal flaw. They are humans, and the government has to pay them to work – until it can find a way to dispense with them. Perhaps that is already happening in San Diego.

I didn’t get past the door during my DMV visit before the security guard pointed to a sign listing a number of services no longer available there. The list included pretty much everything having to do with driver’s licenses or vehicle registration. Huh? And then I saw a man inside who looked a lot like Elon Musk.

The guard wasn’t surprised that I was surprised. He told me I could go to a DMV kiosk – there were four locations listed on a poster –  and apply for a duplicate license. And no, there was no DMV kiosk inside the DMV.

I’m no stranger to kiosks. They’ve been appearing in my life like credit card applications. Two weeks before any medical appointment, my healthcare system starts emailing me suggestions that I check in on-line. Do they really need to ask me my race/ethnicity every single time?  It never changes.

The nagging continues up until the day of the appointment. Now my healthcare system wants me to use a kiosk to tell them I’ve entered the building. Why don’t they just implant a chip in my head? The parking lot entrance that reads my license plate could also scan my brain chip.

And then there was that trip to Home Depot when I couldn’t find a living cashier because there wasn’t one.

The closest DMV kiosk to the Hillcrest office was the downtown Ralph’s Supermarket on G Street. When I got there, I noticed two things. There was no logo on the machine that identified it as a DMV kiosk. But there was a bright red “Out of Order” sign taped on the screen.

A Ralph’s employee explained that some customer “broke” the machine with his credit card. Uh huh. We talked about the lunacy of replacing trained humans with machines that break all too easily. And we agreed on this essential truth: Californians pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state in licensing and car registration fees. We deserve better service. WTF, DMV?