I was in and out of the DMV on Wednesday morning in less than fifteen minutes to renew my driver’s license. That’s the good news. Wait, no; the good news is that there is no bad news. It’s all good news. I’ve never had such an easy time of going to the DMV. (Yay, me.)

The East Side DMV is one big room and at the front they’ve fenced it off with those retractable tape thingies that are always set up on front of airline ticket counters to make you do the snake dance so you won’t mob the agent. Signs hanging from the tape directed me to see a young lady sitting all alone at a service counter to the left of the door.

She was helping someone and there was nobody else in line ahead of me. In fact, there were only six or seven customers in the whole place. Either it wasn’t a very busy office or I got there ahead of the rush. After waiting only a few minutes, the guy ahead of me stepped aside to remove his coat and the young lady waved me over. I explained that I was there to renew my driver’s license, for which she gave me a ticket with “C114” printed on it and a form that had a lot of empty blocks in the top half and a lot of small print in the bottom half.

“I’m going to direct you to the photo booth in the other corner of the room –” and here she pointed at what I could plainly see, even at this distance, was a photo booth: three floor-to-ceiling blueish curtains boxing off a space in front of a boxy black camera that oddly resembled a cafeteria coffee machine — “where they’ll take your picture. After that, you’ll be called up to the counter to help you with the rest.” And then she started fiddling with her computer. That seemed to be the beginning, middle and end of her instructions to me, so I thanked her and crossed the room to the photo booth.

The room was filled with rows of chairs but almost all of them were empty. There appeared to be someone talking to the guy who was operating the photo booth, and none of the “Now Serving” signs were calling for the number on my ticket, so I picked a seat a short distance away from the photo booth and settled in to wait.

Almost as soon as I sat down, I could hear the young woman at the desk by the front door calling out, “Sir? Sir?” I turned around, not because I necessarily thought she was calling to me, but to see whose attention she was trying to get catch. It turned out she was not only calling to me, she was also waving her arms and pointing exaggeratedly in the direction of the photo booth. It would have been a masterpiece of pantomime if she hadn’t been shouting at the same time: “Sir, please go directly to the photo booth to get your picture taken.”

So much for assuming the guy at the camera would call my number or something when he was ready for me. Guess not.

Guy At The Camera spoke every line he directed at me as if he were self-consciously reading them from a script. After backing me into the curtained-off booth he snapped a photo of me that apparently wasn’t up to the high standards of driver’s license photos, because he asked me to wait while the camera recycled, then snapped another photo after asking me to lower my chin a bit. And then I was welcome to take a seat in the lobby and wait.

There was only one person waiting ahead of me so my number was called a few minutes after I sat down. “What can I help you with today?” the young man behind the counter asked me as I approached. I slid my ticket, my driver’s license and the form I’d been given by the young lady as I’d walked in, and told him I was there to renew my driver’s license. He looked down at the empty grid on the upper half of the form, slid it back across the counter at me and said, “I can’t help you until you fill this out.”

Okay, that young lady at the front counter is nice enough, but she’s got to get a little more precise about giving instructions. She never said a word about filling out the form, and I spent twenty-one years in the employ of an institution where sergeants would not only cuss you out, they would cuss out your mother if you so much as wrote your name on a form before they told you to do it. I thought maybe the guy at the counter was going to fill it out, but clearly that was not the case.

The young man let me borrow his pen and waited patiently as I filled in each of the empty little blocks with my name, weight, and so on. There was nobody in line behind me, so I wasn’t holding up production at the DMV, or putting a kink in the young man’s performance numbers. He worked on something else while I scratched out my answers. When I finished the form and slid it back toward him, he started to check it over while he asked me, “Do you need your glasses to drive?”

I thought that was a very strange question to ask because the answer was on the form he was reading, but I didn’t point that out to him. If you want to spend as little time at the DMV as possible, do not ridicule the help. I said yes, I did need my glasses to drive.

“Put your face up to the viewer and read the second line aloud to me,” he said, waving in the direction of a contraption bolted to the countertop to my left.

I hesitated. “With my glasses on?” At the time it seemed to be a relevant question. He said yes, I should keep my glasses on. I pressed my forehead against the hood of the viewer, making the screen light up, and read the dozen or so random letters on the second line. When I stood up again, he was still checking over the form I’d given him. He couldn’t have been looking into the viewer from the other side; he was facing in the other direction.

“Do you have all the lines in the eye test memorized?” I asked him.

There was, while he finished checking the last item on my form, a pause just long enough that I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me, but then he turned to face me and said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Can’t wait for when I get to renew my license. I’m going to do the test with my eyes closed.”

There was just one more thing to take care of before he could renew my driver’s license. “That’ll be thirty-four fifty,” he said, taking me completely by surprise. For whatever reason, the thought had never crossed my mind that I would have to pay a fee to renew my driver’s license. A quick check of my wallet revealed no more than ten wilted singles, not nearly enough. I had to slink off to the ATM at the other side of the room to draw some cash, then slink back, thanking my lucky stars all the while that there were only six or seven other customers to witness my boneheadedness.

And that was it. I went in at quarter past nine and got the heck out of Dodge before the long hand was pointing straight down. It was the most painless fifteen minutes I’ve ever spent at the DMV.