When we bought our CR-V in June, we made the decision to leave our Hyundai Sonata in Arizona and keep our new car in Denver. One car each place. Since we don’t do a whole lot of driving, it made sense. Thus far we’ve done fine with one car.

We ran into a glitch, however, this past July when we got notification of our license renewal for the Hyundai, and the emissions needed to be inspected and certified before the registration could be renewed. Short of jumping on a plane to pick up our car, we didn’t know how to achieve this goal.

“Never fear!” I told my husband. “We can’t be the first people to run into this situation. DMV will know how to handle this!”

While we may not be the only people with this situation, the employees of Denver DMV certainly don’t seem to know the answer. Well, that’s not exactly true. We’ve been to DMV three times, and gotten three different answers. I spent over two hours at the DMV office yesterday, and left, entirely frustrated with the most recent answer. I won’t go into details, but I’m considering driving the Sonata off of a cliff and starting over with a new car. Licensing a new car has to be easier for these people than trying to solve our issue.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. Today I’m writing about DMVs in general. I’m not saying anything that any United States human who has ever visited a motor vehicle department doesn’t already know. Purgatory seems friendlier and more accessible than a typical DMV office. Throw in COVID, and even hell starts to look good.

They lull you in with a friendly security guard, and that’s the last smile you’ll see for the next two hours. Since COVID reared its ugly head, customers are now not even allowed to go inside until there are only five people ahead of you. Neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night keeps DMV employees from making you wait outdoors. Actually, gloom of night does because they stop giving numbers an hour-and-a-half before closing time.

I had been there a full two hours (the last half hour inside the building), staring at the beige walls (there must be a Sherman-Williams color named DMV Blah Beige), when suddenly DMV staff began turning off their lights so that they could go to lunch. I have no problem with lunch breaks. I take one every day. But have they ever considered the idea of staggering the breaks? When all but one of the employees shut off their lights, there was a collective groan among the five of us who had come so close to the Holy Grail that we could nearly touch it.

When I finally got in front of a human, they began to tell me why nothing I say or do will work even before my problem could come out of my mouth. I’m not sure if she was cranky because she wasn’t one of the lucky ones to get lunch at 11:30, but she definitely wasn’t in a congenial mood. It is my hope that she leaves her conviviality for her family at home.

Trey Kennedy says it best in this funny, but oh-so-true video…..