December

The beginning of December is here and it can only mean one thing. It means I forgot to renew my car registration by the end of November when it was due. D'oh! And of course I needed an emissions inspection this year also. Double D'oh! So after dropping the kids off at school I headed over to a local service station to get my emissions done. I was fully expecting to be a in a long line of people that had all waited and were getting their state inspection done to gain that extra month. Surprisingly though when I pulled up there was no one in line and I was the first one after they finished the car they were currently inspecting. So when they finished with that car and came out to get mine at a couple minutes after nine I was fully expecting to be done and back on the road by 9:20. No such luck though. As I waited, and waited, and waited I saw the line (which had been nonexistent when I arrived) grow to be more than seven people by the time they finally brought my car to me at around 9:45.

And the person that brought me my car wasn't the one that had taken it. It was the station's manager. After he told me my car had failed and asked how much would I pay to fix it he quickly explained he was only joking and it had passed with no problems. He then apologized profusely for the amount of time it had taken explaining that the guy doing the inspections was new and had never done an emissions inspection before nor did this new guy understand that the machine had to be calibrated before being used. As irritated as I was at having to wait that long, I could only imagine being that seventh person in line knowing that instead of taking the traditional 10 to 15 minutes per inspection each car might end up taking up to half an hour. So after realizing it had only taken about 40 minutes compared to what it could have been were I not the first in line when I arrived I felt a bit better. I then headed over to the DMV with my new emission passing certificate in hand. And when I got to the DMV at Fair Oaks and saw the line stretch out from the DMV to near where the Starbucks was I promptly turned around and left deciding I would rather pay the fine than stand in that line. I had planned on heading back later in the day, but luckily a co-worker informed me that I could simply renew online. This has the disadvantage of taking potentially a couple weeks before I get my tags, but it beats standing in line at the DMV. And now that the DMV has tacked on a an additional $5 fee for renewing in person it's obvious they don't really want you to physically go to the DMV anymore (at least that's the excuse I'll be using when / if I get pulled over for having expired tags).