Catholic Ragemonkey

Your tax dollars at work...
Well, I had to renew my driver's license yesterday. Oklahoma has moved to a very new look for the license. The photos are now digital and scanned onto a credit card type card and your right and left index fingers are scanned and, I guess, put into some electronic bar code on the card itself. Anyway, the lady working at the local Tag Agency couldn't have seemed less interested with my presence and my prompt attention to my duty to have a valid license if she had tried. Even if she wanted to seem less interested, she wouldn't have been able to generate enough energy to pull it off.

She tapped on some photo device as she told me to look "here" for the photo, but she initiated the photo at the very same time as she gave this direction, with the result that I was in the process of looking up and blinking as the camera went off. Folks, my photo on the new license makes it appear as if I am trying to wake up from heavy sedation. It is ridiculous. I have to live with it until 2009. When I saw the photo, I said, "That's a pretty bad picture." I thought the lady might offer to take it again, since the whole thing is digital (it's not like any photo paper would be wasted). Instead, she said, "They all look bad," and she clicked on "process license" to begin the making of the new card.

And to top it all off, you don't even get to keep your old license anymore. You have to surrender it and they turn it into some Department of Public Safety office. That sort of hacks me off. We are basically paying a tax to have a license and then you don't even get to keep the taxed thing you paid for!