Wed 25 Apr 2007
UPDATE: Well… today everything resolved itself at the last possible minute. Luckily, the people telling us that it was going to be at least another week were wrong. Of course it all works out as soon as I start blogging about it. Like a reverse jinx.
Good times
Why wife is in a living hell right now. As anyone knows who is married, when your wife is in hell… everyone in the family is in hell. It’s a hell created by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
It all started when she decided to get a drivers license again and buy a car. I waited for her while she went in to take the test. When she was done she came out with that frustrated look that I’ve learned to dread. “Did you pass the test?”
“Yeah, but I can’t get my license?”
“Why?”
“They asked me if I had any medical conditions and I told them that I was diabetic.”
“OH NO!!!” I knew instantly what a terrible mistake she had made by telling the truth to a bureaucracy.
Still… it was only a simple little letter from a doctor. She gets that and we are in business and her car loan goes through. She had 30 days. Rushing to the doctor right away and then express mailing the letter with tracking took one day. Now the ball was in their court. 25 days laters we’re still waiting.
She has been trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare for almost a month now. Everything takes 10 days. Opening up the mail? 10 days. Reading the mail? 10 days. That is until you’re on day 11. Then it’s call back tomorrow. Call back tomorrow. Call back tomorrow. Every person you talk to says something different. Half the time their system is down. Never can you get a supervisor to try to fix things.
We’ve had two encounters with the Ohio bureaucracy. Once with the Dayton Public Schools and the Ohio Athletics Association. Each time it’s a NIGHTMARE. What are our taxes going towards? Where’s the representation? Does anyone EVER get fired?
So she calls… and I call… over and over and over and over and over again… trying to find resolution. trying to get on with our lives…
Welcome to hell, Ohio style.
I needed to renew my passport. I sent in the application at the end of February. I still have not received it, get a recording when I call the 800 number, push a lot of buttons to get an answer and finally a recorded voice says good bye. I emailed to track it, and all I got was a reply several days later that it was in New Hampshire somewhere. They want us to understand that they have been inundated with applications since going to Canada and Mexico now require a passport. Oh, and they are working hard it but please be patient and understanding. Mine is simply a renewal not a new application. I can only imagine what it must be like to get a new one. I hope it comes this year.
Good luck with the driver’s license. Try calling your state rep or state senator’s office. That sometimes makes things happen faster.
You can call Jeanie’s office and they can expedite the passport for you
that is if you really need it that badly.
As for the DL – that sounds like a Danny Bupp phone call to me. Seems like this could make a good press release to some Dem who decides to run against him and OH DMV bureaucracy.
I don’t need the passport right away but I think it is ridiculous to have an 800 no. set up with a menu option to speak to customer support and then have a recording say good bye and hang up. Ditto an email system promising to track it and give information and then it just tells you it’s in some office. Big whoop and a waste of money. Things just used to work for people and now the smallest thing is such a hassle because those in office do not value government. And yet they keep making bureaucratic rules and regulations that they have no prayer of managing and we are caught in a mess that rivals something in a Chekov story.
It’s not just Ohio. Pennsylvania is just as bad. As you know, I am in the process of moving and my husband has been living there for a while. He needed to get his driver’s license. Now you need your SSI, birth certificate or passport, and proof of residency. The guy behind the desk rejected my husbands SSI card as illegible. It’s his orginal card and it was perfectly readable just old. Steaming mad that he took time off of work for nothing, he found the SSI office to request a new card. The person there thought it was crazy that the DMV wouldn’t accept his old card but issued him a new one. Then he had to go back to the DMV and wait all over again. A two day process for a driver’s license. Ridiculous and unnecessary. And they don’t take CASH, you must have a check or money order. One more way the discriminate against the poor.
This whole security scare/voter fraud garbage for ID and tracking people by the Bush administration is simply making very difficult for hard working citizens and it’s overwhelming the government agencies that are supposed to serve people.
This made me think of “Life is Beautiful”, “Vita รจ bella”.
Yes, it has that nightmare quality to it. It’s like Catch 22 or I’ll go back to Chekov.