Good Government at the DMV

The DMV has for decades been infamous for its customer service, but here in North Carolina the COVID period has brought it to abject tyranny. Our local DMV has reduced its hours for walk-in appointments to two hours a day, 2:15-4:15 PM. The door is locked at all times, and only one customer -- no parents with minors, or elders, but just one person -- is allowed inside and the door locked behind them. 

For two years they stopped doing road tests, 'because of COVID,' so if you were a younger driver who needed a road test to get a license you just couldn't drive. For years. Too bad. I arranged a temporary address in another state for a young relative so they could get a license, and then transfer it back here to their permanent address. The DMV doesn't care if it screws up your life. You don't matter at all.

Mornings are for appointments only, and you can only make an appointment online because they stopped answering their phone. You can call; they won't answer. I've called a dozen times trying to obtain information from them, and never once has anyone picked up the phone. No online appointments can be made sooner than two months out, not because they are busy -- today they had just one appointment -- but because. These go on until noon, at which point the DMV staff begins a two-hour lunch.

Then, at 2:15, they begin allowing people to come in one at a time according to the waiting list. Today the waiting list was two pages long at noon, two hours before they started seeing anyone, and many of the people there had been coming in for days to try to get seen. Some had come in at six in the morning in order to get their names on the list somewhat higher up.

I didn't actually need anything from the DMV myself today, I just was taking lunch to one of the poor citizens waiting for their government to deign to accept their tax money. They'd taken the day off work to be there, and because they came in at noon -- two hours early -- they were at the bottom of page two of the list. 

"Look," I said as I was passing off their lunch amid a very large crowd, "the DMV are the worst people in the world." The crowd laughed appreciatively, but in a kind of shocked tone at my audacity of speaking so of the mighty bureaucrats who govern their lives. "They have done everything they can to make themselves inaccessible and unaccountable to the citizens who pay their salaries. All you can do is wait on them and hope they do their jobs during the two hours a day they actually pretend to work." 

Just at this time one of the DMV employees walked into the building with his lunch.

"AND THERE'S ONE OF THEM RIGHT THERE!" I said quite loudly, raising my finger to point at him. "That guy is one of these who works only two hours a day while citizens wait for hours and hours!" 

He literally backed into his office and audibly locked the door trying to get away from all the people suddenly glaring at him. 

Now as I said, I didn't need anything from them and was just there to bring somebody lunch, so I left. I heard later, though, that the DMV employees somehow managed to get through every single person on the waiting list this afternoon. The people who'd been waiting for days were just stunned at how quickly the line moved today, compared to other days recently. Nobody was sent away without being seen today.

These people work for us. It's about time they remembered it.