DMV

The Man and I had some business to attend to at the Department of Motor Vehicles this afternoon. I collected him from work and we drove across town to the large office we had grown to love so well on previous visits.

What we needed doing was a date change, before July 1st, next to the "temporary visitor" (aka "dodgy foreigner") stamp on our driving licenses. Potentially quite a simple exercise, but earlier experience of New York state bureaucracy had made us wary. We'd found nothing online about our particular situation, and we were doubtful of getting a useful answer if we phoned. Hence we went in person.

We parked the car, but as we were climbing out the Man asked, "Did you bring that envelope?"

"What? The envelope you've just now told me about for the first time? Er, no."

How we laughed on the drive home to pick up the envelope containing the relevant paperwork and our passports!

Not quite as much as we laughed when got back and showed the man at the information desk said paperwork and passports (and our still-legal licenses) and he told us, politely, that we also needed to bring in our Social Security cards.

So, let's see. We bring in two forms of photo I.D., with additional biometric information, and ourselves to compare the photos against - but they also need to see a piece of card with a number printed on it?

Okaaay.

You can imagine our mirth as we drove home, and then back to the DMV, again.

The good news is that we did, eventually, succeed in submitting the relevant forms. In the process we wasted nearly as much fuel as that broken pipe in the Gulf of Mexico, but that's just how it goes sometimes I guess.

(By the way, if you've bothered to follow all - or any - of the links, you'll be wondering what could have possessed us even to think of turning up at a state office without our SSN cards. We must just have wiped the memory of all those earlier traumas from our minds...)