renewed! (awaiting renewal 3)

ahh, that's refreshing. I stalled three days aganizing over the effort it would take to humble myself to sitting for hours at the TLC (aka T&LC, aka The Taxi and Limousine Commision). The biggest fear was that the over sized waiting room would not even know where to start with an un-anticipated glitch in the system.

To my surprise it was all handled with ease. After going through a serious bag check and metal detector downstairs, I handed my Driving record abstract to the guy at the main window. I explained the situation with ease after I'd been thinking about the simplest way to describe it since friday. The man at the window didn't even need my abstract, he instead looked up my record on his computer and low and behold, he didn't see the suspension on the license. He handed me a pink card with my information on it and a slip with a number on it.

but what do I do now? up until this point I was pretty confident in myself, I was walking to all the right places and even suggesting ideas for where the nearest notary was. I was translating broken english for people. This threw me for a loop, I wasn't sure what I was even there for anymore. I just wanted somebody to tell me it would be okay. I found a personnel woman and asked her what the guy meant by, "Just go over there." She told me to have a seat and wait for my number to be called. evidently I wasn't a special case, so I sat down.

My number was D332, and within minutes D328 was called. Woohoo, I'll be out of here in no time I thought, but then 15 minutes passed and then a half hour. Numbers such as A015 were called, and B159. There about 7 people working to process people out of 13 windows. one person or two complained with misunderstandings with the counter-people, another complained to whoever else waiting would listen about the lack of service, and another threw a fit because he was waiting for 2 hours. The youngest and cutest of the girls working behind the window (it was no contest really) was filling out a resume or a job application, and asking her co-worker for help.

On the positive side of things, since last year, they installed two flat screen TV sets which played CNN with closed captions. The closed captioning was too quick for me to read. The coolest thing they showed was footage of a "news" photographer getting his ass kicked by a disgruntled real estate "scum bag?". Another huge improvement from last year, was that the digital prompters which displayed the numbers being called, WORKED! Last time I was there, one woman had to use a microphone which broadcasted through cheap computer speakers.

I waited about 45 minutes to an hour. Then after that I was told to sit down again.

"Wha.. why am sitting down?"

"Your license is expired, you have to get a new one."

Could this be, am I actually going to walk out with a new license? after another 20 minutes, I was called in to the photo room. I didn't have to get another bad picture taken, I just walked in and received a new one. I read it out loud, "Expires 2009," Sweet!!

Question: How many TLC workers does it take to get a problem solved?

Answer: Ask somebody else, I'm busy. No actually go across town, get it fixed yourself, in that time we should have the problem solved.