Ah, the eternal fun and games of the Secy of State’s office… I headed over there this afternoon to do the yearly Ritual of Plate Renewal. And yes, I know about renewing by mail or via the web – I needed to be there in person for a new drivers license anyway, so I figured I’d take care of the plate at the same time.
Anyway, it seems that they’re having a system-wide computer glitch that had slowed everything to a crawl. At 3:30 I was the 120th person in line, and by 4:15 they’d taken care of less than 50 of the people in front of me.
I’ll be heading back sometime during the day next week. Rather than continue to wait in line, I headed home. Sure, they probably would have gotten more people at the counter to take care of the waiting throng, but my boss is pretty cool about letting me take flex time when I need to. Something about the way that I tend to work through lunch hours…
The other factor that made me decide to leave was a bit of physical comedy that happened. The woman sitting on my right was one of those people who wear their wristwatches backwards so that the face was on the inside of her forearm. It was one of those watches with a really ornate metal watchband, so maybe she was showing it off as a bracelet or something. She’d been there when I came in, and was kind of dozing a bit, newspaper in her right hand, cold cup of coffee in her left. Then the guy next to her asked what time it was.
She started awake, blinked at the guy, then looked at her watch. This involved raising her arm and twisting it so that she could see the watch face. And when she did that, she dumped cold coffee down my arm.
And that REALLY woke her up.
I haven’t heard that many “Ohmygawds” in a long time. She kept up a running stream of them, punctuated with the occasional “I’m so sorry!” and “Are you ok?” while she tried to blot coffee off my arm with her newspaper. I tried to help, but I was laughing too hard. It was such a wonderfully absurd situation…