Part one of two: Wylie Coyote visits the DMV

I’m trying to be a good citizen, now. I moved to my home state from New Jersey and I dutifully went to the DMV for my Wisconsin driver’s license. My sister warned me that the DMV is infamous for sucking, but, Jeez—I’m from New Jersey. How bad could it be?

I survived the new, improved, privatized NJ DMV “Six Points of ID” system. And that’s a really scary process because they deal with a lot of undocumented aliens and the staff is very jaded. Rude, too, but in a superficial “I treat everyone like this, it’s not personal” way. You walk out feeling used and abused by the process–not by the processors.

I presented myself at the “Milwaukee – Northwest service center at 7301 W. Mill Road confident that the innate courtesy of Milwaukeeans would make this visit a memorable and satisfying experience. (No, really. Don’t laugh. I was really feeling it.)

Ok. you can snigger a little if you must.

While the NJ office employees were supercilious, snotty and arrogant, they were, at least, even-handed. The abuse was vetted in an “equal opportunity” manner. The Milwaukee employees were ignorant, unprofessional and capricious, selectively enforcing (or over-enforcing) the rules depending on the victim which stood before them.

Short version: I got hosed. Again and again. (You can read the whole story in part 2 of this blog.) It didn’t help that the written ‘rules’ for proof of residency and proof of name are unnecessarily narrow and written documentation vague.

Me being me, I came home from my 4th fruitless attempt and wrote a scathing letter to the DMV. I addressed it to Supervisor “Gerald Williams”, his supervisor, “Debbie Kramer”, and the DOT Customer Relations Department in Madison. Boy. I showed them! It was a pretty good letter, too. Too bad nobody read it. You can read it, though. It’s in my next blog entry. This one is getting too long.

Epilogue

The next week I went to the Northeast branch of the DMV with the same documentation, and sailed out in 20 minutes with my shiny new Wisconsin Driver’s license. The picture wasn’t horrendous, either.