Waiting for Auto

I wonder who will believe us when we tell them how long we were here.
- the wife

No wonder there are so many illegal immigrants--they're too smart to wait in these *%&@ lines.
- another satisfied DMV patron

You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you've been waiting on a hot, sticky summer day for a chance to ride your favorite amusement park roller coaster and you think you're near the front of the line when you turn a corner to discover yet another endless of sea of would-be riders snaking slowly through a new series of turnstiles in front of you and you realize that you're still an hour or more away from actually boarding the coaster?

Yeah, our day at the DMV was sort of like that... except that no cool ride awaited us after we spent over 5 hours in a series of a half dozen or so lines... just two Connecticut drivers' licenses and vehicle registrations ringing in at a grand total of $527.

What made matters worse was that the DMV employees actually seemed to enjoy the collective misery of those languishing in motor vehicle purgatory. When we got to the front of the first of several lines, I asked the lady behind the counter if we would have to wait with the crowd of people to my left. "No," she answered, convincingly deadpan. "I don't know what they're waiting for. They must be here for something else." Moments later, the wife and I found ourselves waiting for our requisite eye exams in the midst of the same crowd.

Later, after we had filled out our second or third or thirteen-thousandth form of the day, I asked another attending cheerful DMV employee, "How long do you estimate we'll have to wait once we've completed this form?"

"The wait will be about two hours," he responded. He paused, looking from my face to my wife's and back to mine. "I'm just kidding!" He began to laugh, then abruptly ceased. "I'm not kidding. There are 60 people in line ahead of you right now."

"You are kidding," I half-asked, half-demanded.

"Yeah." He paused again, waiting, presumably, until relief had begun to reveal itself on our faces. "No, I'm not kidding." He smiled broadly.

We walked away, bemused.

"Was he joking?" I asked my wife.

"I don't think so," she replied.

"He must have been joking," I concluded.

He wasn't joking.

By the time our visit to the Connecticut DMV concluded, I had become completely disoriented, dazed and confused, nearly unresponsive to the normal stimuli of the external world. I was practically catatonic; neither pizza nor Watson nor latest issue of the New Yorker could rouse me from my stupor.

It wasn't until hours later when I watched the spastic wide-eyed unwitting Wipeout contestants, limbs flailing, stochastically caroming from one giant red bouncy ball to the next in hopes of winning $50,000 that I began to awake from my DMV-induced walking coma. In fact, our 5-hour DMV experience may have been rendered less excruciating, if not downright bearable, had Wipeout been broadcast throughout the facilities rather than the thirty-minute loop of DMV trivia and news they pipe through their closed-circuit television systems.

When I'm President...