It started innocently enough several months ago. I had to run to the bank, so I parked (entirely legally) in a parking garage in the Marina that I often use as my go-to when hitting up Chase on Chestnut. I was in the bank for seven minutes, tops, and when I got back to my car I was chagrined to find a ticket: for not having a front license plate.
I have and have always had a front license plate. Confusion.
Perplexed, I decided to shrug it off, laugh a little bit at the absurdity of it (who gets a parking ticket inside a parking garage anyway?) and did what anyone in my place would do: I took a picture of my very obviously real front license plate with my iPhone, and sent it in with a courteous and only mildly snide letter the very next day.
Thus ensued several months of periodic mail from the DMV telling me that they had received my rebuttal and were processing and pondering over it.
In due time, I got their final word: “Sorry, you lose.” I was in fact going to have to pay a $110 fine for an imaginary infraction. My complacent, calm attitude toward the unscrupulousness of meter maids started to wear thin.
But there was a loophole. This was a FIX-IT TICKET, so I could, if I chose, go to the DMV and ask a DMV employee to look at my car with his eyes, verify that I do in fact have a front license plate, and sign off on my ticket.
Now, you may ask yourself, why would a picture of the car with the license plate on it not be enough to prove that I do in fact have a license plate? Innocently, I asked a kindly DMV worker that same question. She said, “How would we know that you didn’t just temporarily put that plate on just for the picture?” Right. That makes perfect sense. It’s entirely plausible that I carry around my rightful, legitimate license plate in the hatchback of my car so that I can put it on temporarily in emergency situations, but then take it right off again and put it back in my car for safekeeping. The fuck?
I chose today to go to the DMV. The conditions were perfect: I was in the right part of my lunar cycle to not be overly homicidal with strangers; my workload is relatively light this week; I got myself psyched up.
Forty-five minutes into the line, I was still feeling stoic. When the disaffected counter dude told me that I didn’t need a number, but should just drive my car up to the dark, desolate far side of the DMV and “wait there,” I trusted. An hour later, after exhausting all possible modes of iPhone entertainment and not having seen hide nor hair of a single DMV employee, I got only slightly fidgety. In fact, I did not start to actually cry until I went back into the DMV and politely asked a worker if, in his opinion, someone would ever come help me. He looked at me like I had just crawled out from a sewer pipe behind the building and pretended not to speak the language.
(At this point, the refrain of “Alice’s Restaurant” was looping through my head ominously.)
About twenty more minutes later, a large, expressionless, highly exasperated DMV matron showed up to sign off on my piece o’ paper, but not before I witnessed her have a very long drawn out conversation with a policeman (what in DMV parlance is ironically called a “peace officer,” it turns out) who then left the premises. About thirty seconds into my conversation with the DMV worker, she deduced that — contrary to what this piece of paper said — I couldn’t actually have her sign it, but needed a “peace officer,” and “Sorry, that one just left for the day.”
She suggested that I drive over to the police station, and with a wave of the hand in a vague southwesterly direction she presumably sent me to the nearest one. Off I went to drive in circles for about another half hour while trying to find this elusive police station she talked so highly of, which turned out to exist only in her imagination. After a futile Google Map search I ended up back in my town, where I started, at the Mill Valley police station, which, mind you, has two possible entranceways—both with clear “do not enter signs.”
I parked across the street and walked on foot to the closest doorway, where I pleaded my by-now-nearly-hysterical case to a nice lady cop, who laughed, and signed my piece of paper, and didn’t even look at my car. Which made me remember why I love living in Mill Valley. And wonder if maybe I should just never leave my little bubble of a town.
And then I went off to the Whole/Blithedale to drown my sorrows in a big fat almond milk shake.
Stay tuned for part two… when I try to find a stamp to mail the freaking letter.
