You know what I love about the DMV? I mean, besides the way their camera makes a completely normal law-abiding citizen look like a career felon. I like the way they put everyone on a level playing field. A business man in a three-piece suit, a gangly first-time teenage driver, a middle-aged mom that can't find her driver's license anywhere even though she's checked every coat pocket, every purse, under every car seat, and the dryer after every load for weeks on end. We are all at the hands of a few individuals armed with the power of rules we had no hand in making and have no ability to alter. Rules that require us to dig through dark corners of the closet and sift through years of memorabilia looking for long-lost, crumpled documents. Like, your birth certificate to prove you're a legal citizen, your social security card to cross-check that you don't have outstanding child support payments, and your marriage license to prove that your name legally changed. No, your social security card doesn't do that, at least not according to the DMV. My favorite is needing a bill in your name with your home residence on it, but without a P.O. Box listed. Somehow having a P.O. Box on the envelope along with your home address voids the place you actually live. That is, unless your homeless. In which case, as the Oregon DMV website puts it, you can use a desciptive address such as, (and I quote) "under the west end of the Burnside Bridge". Yep. The rest of us must dig through boxes and bills to find something that comes directly to our house and not to a P.O. Box, but if you mention that you're homeless, well, just a vague corner of the city will work just fine too. So much for that even playing field, huh? I bet their pictures turn out looking like glamour shots, too.
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