faulty vision

It’s a short entry tonight, because I’m too lazy to do anything substantive. I’ve had an entire weekend of aggressive relaxation — yay, three-day weekends! — and the only thing that’s left of my brain after more than the recommended daily allowance of television and food is the ability to write in short, one-syllable sentences.

Yuhri take bath. Yuhri read book. Yuhri brush head.

Yuhri go New York.

Work is sending me out to the Big Apple (TM) as of tomorrow, a decision that initially filled me with joy but is now doing more to fill me with, well, nausea. Like any classic karmic scenario, my body has seen fit to launch me into full-scale PMS just a few scant days before. While normally that doesn’t mean anything — in Yuhri-land, PMS just means “Possibly Menstrual Symptoms,” since my uterus is often too apathetic to go beyond the PMS to the actual MS — this evening I came home to discover that, well. Let’s just say I’ve gone dipping in the diaper well.

TMI, anyone?

So there we go. If I run true to form, I’ll need to change my clothing at least once tomorrow, seeing as how it’s the first day of my period. My uterus, as though to make up for prior lethargy, always makes up for its failures during the first few days of my period. This usually involves “cleansing” the system of the backlog of blood that has built up in the system over the months between.

…which all leads me to the point of all this, which is that in a few hours, I’m going to be in New York. Brooklyn, to be exact. From Wednesday to Saturday I can be found at the 4th Avenue Comfort Inn — or at least reached there, mostly — while I labor on my company’s behalf and fight off the worst effects of anemia.

I promise you all stories when I get back. Like a good little girl, I’m taking my laptop. Will you believe me if I swear I’ll write a journal entry every night and upload them when I get back?

Me neither.

I was talking with my friend Jazz a few years ago. She’d gotten a QA job working for some start-up; me, I was still floundering through my career transition crisis, and reaching desperately for any information that could have a conceivable impact on my future. It occurred to me to consider QA (that’s Quality Assurance, for the elucidation of the innocent) as a career after the following exchange.

Me: “Does it pay well?”

Jazz: “Yes.”

To a musician on a $16,000/year budget in the high-priced slum district of San Francisco, this is more than adequate to get the blood rushing to the head. There are those who’d cavil by pointing out that the concept of “good pay” is relative. To these people, I would point out that in order to make $16,000 per year, a person would have to work 40 hours a week on $7.69 an hour. In this particular instance, “good pay” wasn’t relative at all; there was, in fact, a presuptive baseline* from which to calculate all subsequent comparison. $8.00 an hour would have been a tremendous leap in financial reward. It would have been the eight-digit lottery as far as I was concerned.

Me: “So what does it entail, being a QA person? You basically find things that’re broken, right?”

Jazz: “Sort of.”

Me: “I could do that.”

Jazz: “It’s more like you look for things that can break, and break them.”

Me: “Break things? I can do that. I’m good at that. I break everything.”

Jazz: “Um.”

Me: “So how do you go about doing that?”

Jazz: “Okay, let’s see. How would you go about testing a trampoline?”

Me: “Jump up and down on it! Up and down, up and down, yay!!”

See, this is why I’m not a QA engineer.

With a long-suffering note in her voice, Jazz commented, “See, that’s what ninety percent of people would say. QA engineers would look at a trampoline and say, okay, how much weight can we put on it until it breaks, and how does it break? What happens if we put it on a carpet as opposed to concrete? That sort of thing.”

“Anal retentive,” I summarized.

Jazz frowned over the phone. I heard her. “It’s not so much anal retentive as it is just looking at things a different way,” she said at last. Jazz is inherently incapable of agreeing with someone right off the bat. This is the lawyer in her. “You look at the specs and say, okay, this is how you claim it works, but what if the user does it this way? And you have to pick out all these stupid things that stupid users would do.”

“I’m not a stupid user,” I announced proudly. “I’m a smart user.”

Back then, I didn’t know that this was a contradiction in terms. One is either a user, or one is smart. One cannot be both. Jazz graduated from MIT with a Bachelors in Computer Science, and suffers from no trace of American Tact Disorder (not to be confused with Asian Tact Deficiency Disorder), wherein one tap-dances around unpleasant facts long enough that they die and shrivel away into hollow husks of old age. “No you’re not,” she said flatly. And that was that.

Fast forward several years later, to the cube in a warehouse where I’m performing my own retrospective version of QA. In the years between my technical innocence and today, I’ve discovered that I lack the anal rete — excuse me, I meant to say the self-discipline — to be a truly effective QA engineer. While I enjoy finding bugs, I also prefer to find them on the fly, without recourse to a schedule. I’m the kind of person that programmers hate, the bright-eyed, excited know-it-all that pops up over the cubicle wall waving a big piece of paper charting the existence of a hitherto Undocumented Feature*.

“People like you get fired,” says Jazz, with that unerring charm and diplomacy that’s become her trademark over the years.

I was sitting at a table with a group of coworkers at my new office, doing QA on the latest release of the application. Our Overlord entered bearing gifts: a stack of neatly stapled, collated checksheets of things to test and limits to stretch. “So-and-so from QA sent them to us,” she said helpfully, and passed them around the room. We flipped through the stapled pages and discovered a catalog of Things To Test well over nine pages long.

“I’ll start from the front,” said one of my coworkers.

“In that case, I’ll start from the back,” said another one.

I flipped mine to somewhere in the middle and squinted. It looked dull. “I’ll start in the middle,” I offered brightly, and ignored all things written, henceforth.

Jazz was right, you know. QA pays quite well.

The latest stage of the Great Auto Purchase has been the task of looking for a decently priced auto loan, something with an interest rate of six to eight percent. “I can get a loan for 5.99%,” said the Guy, cheerfully. “They won’t even ask me what for. All I have to do is make a few phone calls and I’ll have the money.”

Thus armed with a baseline and the assurance that lenders weren’t really very bright, I started to shop around.

The first stop was San Mateo Credit Union. I submitted an electronic application and received a phone call in a little under two hours.

“Hi!” said the cheerful, businesslike woman on the other end. “I’m processing Internet applications and I’m calling about your application for an auto loan!”

Everything she said was in exclamation points. I could see them at the end of her sentences, like little thumbtacks pinning each! application! to! her! board! “Wow, you guys are quick,” I said, heaping praise on her head. Always good to try to butter up your loan agent before you get a quote. You never know.

“No problem!” she chirped. “It’s a pleasure! So, you’re interested in an auto loan for X dollars!?”

“Yes’m,” said I, wringing my hat in hands. Metaphorically, that is. “Could you tell me the interest rate on a loan of that size?”

“We can give it to you with a maximum of 36 months for repayment!” she exclaimed, apparently feeling it a cause for congratulations. “Your interest rate will be only 10.90%!”

I gagged.

She heard me.

“What year is the car?!” she wanted to know.

“1997,” I said, weakly. “10.90%?”

“See, if it had been five years or older, it would be 7%!” she explained brightly. “If it was four years or older, it would be 6.90%!”

I blinked at the phone. “The older it is, the higher the interest?” I wondered blearily. “Wait a minute.” 1997. 1998. 1999. 2000. 2001….something wrong there. “Did you say 7%–?”

As chance would have it, my email abruptly burped at me. My presence was needed! it beeped impatiently. What are you doing on the phone?! Attend to me! me! me! immediately!

I promised to call the loan officer later — “Sure! 9 to 5:30, except for tonight!” — and sat down to deal with work, all the while attempting to do math in my head. (2002 minus 1997 is…and 7 = 10.90?)

*baseline – An impossible standard, set by optimists for a group of pessimists, given to realists to be overshot and undercut in the most expensive way possible.

*Undocumented Feature – Also known as a bug. A flaw. A mistake. An error. A screw-up. It sounds so much better to call it an Undocumented Feature; that way, when customers or managers show up demanding to know why one’s application has seen fit to issue subpoenas to all males over the age of six with the letter ‘E’ in their last names, one can sit back and drawl, “It’s an Undocumented Feature,” with the comfortable awareness that no matter when the word “f*ck-up” enters the conversation, it won’t be you that introduces it.

A considerate reader pointed out that despite my claims of carpool lane benefit associated with the purchase of a Toyota Prius, California State does not in fact grant the much coveted Carpool designation to hybrids. Somewhat incredulous, I investigated online. Surely he must have been mistaken? After all, I saw quite a few single-passenger hybrids spitting down the carpool lane in the middle of rush hour on 101. However, it turned out that my astute reader was quite correct: California State does not consider the hybrid to be a Carpool Vehicle.

“If you wait long enough though,” the reader pointed out, “Honda’s coming out with a hybrid Civic.”

I started to reply back to him with thanks for the new info — learning about the hybrid-carpool thing was good, since it lets me look all clever and stuff later during really dull dinner conversation with complete strangers, (”So, you’re an accountant at Arthur Anderson? How’s that working out for you? And hey, did you know that hybrid cars aren’t Carpool Vehicles?”) — and then went down this long and sticky path of self-justification over my impending purchase of a (gag) mini-(gag)-SUV.

It occurred to me in the middle of the email that I really have absolutely no justifications for purchasing Lebin’s old car, besides the fact that it’s practically brand new with the exception of the 75,000 miles he’s put on it. There’s barely a ding on the paint, and the interior of the car has been covered in plastic pretty much since the day he bought it. In fact, the only real reason I have for buying it is that it’s cheap at $9000, somewhat outside the original range I’d had in mind for a car but still fairly reasonable for all that.

In fact, I don’t think it’s even possible to buy a working car for $6.17, so while disappointed, I’m not overly distraught over having gone outside my original car budget.

Anyway, it seemed to me that I really should have some sound reasons for making a purchase of this size and magnitude. I promptly sat down and wrote up a few, which I now present for your approval.

1. I AM PROVIDING JOBS.

By purchasing a Honda SUV, I am adding my dollars to the flow of cash that cycles in and out of a supply chain, providing employment and livings for automobile, petroleum, and highway workers everywhere. The purchase of a car takes money from a bank and gives it to a company, which pays its workers with some and buys more cars with the rest. The car company takes the money and pays its workers to make more cars. The auto-workers take their money home and buy corn dogs for their children, who will eventually grow up with serious chemical imbalances. The corn-dog seller uses the money to buy more corn-dogs from corn-dog manufacturers, who buy corn from farmers. Farmers take the money and pay it back to the bank, which owns their farm, and so the natural cycle is returned to its source, with the only exception that somehow I seem to have fallen out of the loop.

Oh. That’s right. It doesn’t matter because I’m buying it secondhand from an individual.

2. I AM PLAYING A ROLE ON THE STAGE OF WORLD POLITICS.

I am becoming one of a massive statistic, part of the American market that is rapidly consuming 25% of the earth’s finite natural resources and providing labor to thousands of workers around the globe. By purchasing a gas-guzzler — the Honda CRV gets 20 to 25 miles to the gallon — I am contributing to the black market for oil that Saddam Hussein is exploiting to raise billions for his war chest, thus providing the US government with a Bad Guy for public relations purposes. At the same time, I am offering financial support through oil purchase to the US allies in Saudi Arabia, and incidentally through them supporting the mutawwa’in in their righteous, God-given quest to stamp out Vice and promote Virtue in burning schoolgirls everywhere.

3. I AM SUPPORTING THE FREE MARKET ECONOMY.

I’m not really sure what a free market economy is, except that the phrase shows up every so often on NPR broadcast, which leads me to think that it’s fairly important to the whole American Lifestyle thing. However, I do remember my classes in high school social studies, which taught me that I am contributing my support to the import of foreign vehicles into the United States, which in turn is providing the basis of a competitive automobile market that will benefit American consumers. Competition forces companies to better serve the consumer’s needs and desires in terms of pricing, feature, and quality.

I mean, hey, just take a look at those American beers and how they’re waging war against foreign Canadian imports. Nobody could deny that the competition is forcing big American brands like Budweiser and Coors to create their own distinct line in price, quality, and taste.

4. I NEED SOMEPLACE TO HANG THE STUFFED DODO WE BOUGHT IN MAURITIUS.

His name is Obediah. Don’t ask me why. The Guy’s a freak.

5. I AM POOR.

Four months of unemployment, despite the occasional unemployment check and many hard hours playing Final Fantasy on the Playstation, have somehow failed to keep my bank account in a healthy and attractive shade of black. (NR, this is one of the very few places in colloquial “American” that the color black is used to designate something good. Normally, one uses black to refer to bad things: “black as he’s painted,” “blackguard,” “black-hearted,” “black October.” This, I’m fairly sure, could be construed as a slight towards our black cousins. On the other hand, when it comes to accounting, “black” is good, while “red” is bad. My. What a quandary for the NAACPA.)

As I was saying, I’m poor. $9000 is a very good deal for a practically-new-car with a high resale value and four, count them, four whole wheels.

6. I AM EXERCISING MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT AS AN AMERICAN TO BE A DUMB-ASS.

The theory goes like this. 1) I will be in a bigger car. 2) I will therefore be safer than people in smaller cars. 3) If I’m ever in an accident, this will keep me safer than the person in the other car.

Of course, this assumes that everybody else on the road is driving a smaller car, which is no longer the case since everybody else on the road has come to the same Conclusion 3 detailed above. There’s the added fact that driving an SUV doesn’t necessarily mean that the people riding the SUV will be safer than they would be if they were riding a smaller passenger car. What it means is that the people riding the passenger car will be 47 times more likely to be killed than they would if they were hit by a regular passenger car. I suppose in some classic American way, this constitutes greater safety: more of them died than us. We win, end of story.

Let nobody charge me with being un-American.

Getting insurance has so far turned out to be one of those heinous experiences that one only attempts to replicate when courting early Purgatory. I’m still waiting for return phone calls from three companies, while a fourth attempted to convince me that $1200+ for a year’s worth of coverage wasn’t utterly unreasonable.

At yet another agency, I finally pinned down an assistant to a rep in between their lunch breaks, tea breaks, coffee breaks, and cooler breaks, and proceeded to wring a quote by proxy. In other words, she’d ask me a question, I’d answer, she’d excuse herself, go and ask a rep, then return to the phone and give me the answer, followed by another question, which I’d then answer.

“So you don’t have insurance now?” she asked in an official-sounding voice.

“Not right now, no,” I said. “I used to have Safeco, but I moved two years ago and decided to terminate that.”

“Oh,” she said, and went off to confer with her Ubermind. A few minutes later, she was back. “So you haven’t been driving?” she asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question.

I answered it anyway. “Sort of. I mean, I wasn’t, but now I am from time to time as needed. Like, to get to work and stuff.”

“Oh,” she said, and then there was a small pause. When she spoke again, the Official in her voice had dropped, to be replaced with Vaguely Baffled. “Isn’t that sort of illegal?”

“Mm,” said I.

They eventually decided I should pay about $480 every six months. Which is, okay, better. Sorta.

I complained to my sister later. “I would think they’d be more impressed by the fact that I haven’t had an accident in the last seven years.”

“It’s not that impressive if you haven’t even driven in seven years,” she observed.

Oh. Turns out that my neighbors upstairs weren’t in fact having noisy and bouncy sex. It was an earthquake all along.

I’m relieved. Sort of.

I test drove the car on Monday, which means I’m 3/5th of the way to actually purchasing. Step 4 is to get a car loan to cover the cost of the car; step 5 is to get insurance for the car and take it home. Once that’s over with, I’ll be the proud owner of my first, very own set of wheels. All the insurance companies I’ve talked to thus far want to charge me between $680 and $990 for every six months. $1980 a year for car insurance? I don’t think so.

Oh. Did I forget to tell you guys about buying the car?

The Guy’s friend has been looking to sell his car, “to someone I know,” he said. Apparently, he’d put on a lot of things and kept it in very good condition — ski racks, CD player, pristine carpets and upholstery — and he didn’t want to waste it on some completely unknown Machuguna answering a Craigslist ad. “I was going to give it to my brother, originally,” he said. “Unfortunately, my brother hasn’t learned how to drive yet.”

“Yuhri’s looking for a car,” the Guy remembered. “Let me drop her a line and ask her if she’s interested.”

So it was that I received an email from the Guy at work. “Lebin’s looking to sell his 1997 CRV,” it read. “You interested?”

I looked online. (CRV? What the hell was a CRV?)

“Mini-SUV,” read one review. My eyes skipped over the ‘mini’ and went straight to ‘SUV.’

Say it with me now, folks. “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not of the things that be of God, but those that be of gas-guzzling.”

“I want a Prius,” I told the Guy firmly, and at length. “I want a Honda Civic or a Prius.”

He nodded obligingly. “Okay.”

“It’s because the Prius is a hybrid and it’s good for the environment,” I explained. “It doesn’t use as much gas. Plus, it’s got low emissions. I’ll be supporting the technology, and I’ll be supporting the environment, and just think of all the money I’ll be saving on gas. Plus, I could ride in the car pool lane all by myself if I wanted to, and that would be so awesome during rush hour.”

He nodded obligingly. “Then get one.”

“Otherwise I could get a Honda Civic, which is cheaper. I mean, it’s not as good as the Prius, but at least it’s a good, sound, small car. I don’t want a large car. Ick. But the Civic has pretty good room in it, not that I need it or anything, plus it has a great resale value and is good for the environment. I mean, relatively. Lots of miles per gallon.”

His head kept nodding; his eyes were glazing over. “You should do that.”

“I will,” I said firmly. “I’m not interested in a SUV. SUVs are … they’re evil. Yuck. I mean, ew.”

“Yes, dear.” He patted me on the head. “Evil.”

A few days later I went down to test-drive the CRV.

I hate myself. I really do.

I informed the Guy that we would be cutting off about a foot’s length of his hip-length hair. (Yes, hip-length. For those that don’t know him, trust me when I say he’s not a hippie-type. He’s more of a, well, bright-yellow-bumblebee-safety-sign-sports-bike-kinda-Hells-Angel-but-geek-type.)

“Look at it,” I reproached, fiddling with the ends of his braid. “It’s all damaged at the ends. It’s practically white. It’s dry and cracked. You need to cut off about six inches and start all over again.”

“Sure,” he said amiably.

“In fact,” I said, discovering once again that peeling split ends is possibly one of the most idiotic and soul-soothing occupations anywhere, provided said split ends are attached to someone else’s head, “In fact, you should cut off at least a foot. Definitely at least a foot.”

The Guy was starting to get suspicious with the deliberation with which I was playing with his hair. Nonetheless, he was agreeable. “Okay. A foot’s not much. What is it, only yea long.” He measured out what he fondly imagined to be a foot with his forefingers.

I peered at the distance between them. It’s possible that in Guy-world, compensating for a radical Guy-world curve in space-time, that particular distance could have equated to twelve inches. “Um,” I said.

Here on Planet Earth with everybody else — everybody being the female half of the population, which actually measures using a straight ruler and not in, shall we say, relative-anatomy terms — what he was measuring would have been closer to six inches. Maybe seven.

“Not quite,” I said.

He optimistically inched his fingers a little further apart. “This much?”

I started to snicker into his shoulder.

“Hey,” said he. “You know the explanation about why women can’t park?”

It’s a whole new, well, month, and I’m employed. Am I happy about this? Yes. Am I delighted that I now wake up at 7:00 am, shower, dress up, don make-up, brush my hair for pity’s sake, then drive to Mountain View to be a productive member of society?

Let’s not push it, shall we?

It’s taken the entire week for me to become accustomed to the phenomenon of mornings, something I’d happily managed to erase from my memory during my halcyon months of unemployment. It’s a rude awakening to have them brought back to my memory, so to speak, and the end result is that I wake up tired and sleepy and come home tired and sleepy. Neither day nor evening lend themselves to the act of writing, which requires a lot more effort on my part than you might think.

I won’t be writing so much about my new job; not the way I used to write about my old job, that is. This is because I haven’t yet gotten to know the people there, but also because I’m a grown-up now and I’m going to try to keep this job for more than six months. It’s not a good time to be unemployed, and work is work.

That means you’ll all be left with my personal life to munch on. Is that good enough?

What’s left of it, that is . . .

The Friday before last, I finally got around to getting my driver’s license.

My California state driver’s license.

Considering the fact that I’ve been living in California for well over three years, it seems a bit anticlimactic to be getting my driver’s license now, of all times. I have the feeling that it shows a distinct lack of commitment to my new state.

In fact, it wasn’t until Friday that I remembered I’d been meaning to get a California state driver’s license at all. Since I would be driving the boyfriend’s car almost exclusively as of the following Monday — not to mention going to work in said car — it seemed like an issue of common sense to go to the trouble of applying for a California license.

“Just study,” advised the Guy, patting my head on the way out the door. “Download the handbook and read it. I flunked it three times before I passed the test, so don’t feel bad if you don’t make it the first time. I’ve heard they’ve made it harder since then.”

I curled up in my chair, drowned in my lucky flannel Tweety Bird pajamas, and contemplated PDF files from the Department of Motor Vehicles until I got bored — all of half an hour — then crawled into the living room and drowsed in front of the Tivo (Law & Order!) for an hour or two. By then it was one o’clock. That was clever of me, I told myself, thoughtfully. One o’clock is the perfect time to go to the DMV. Having convinced myself that I’d planned my schedule to avoid the lunch crowd at the DMV, I puttered around my room, found some dingy sweats that didn’t smell too badly, and changed.

Then I drove to the DMV to take the test to get a driver’s license.

Then I drove back home, because I’d forgotten to take my driver’s license with me.

Then I drove back to the DMV to take the test to get a driver’s license.

By the time I’d reemerged in the DMV, it was two o’clock, and the stubby little line that had consisted of three people at 1:15 pm was now a snaky, sullen line of twelve people. On the other hand, DMV employees were returning from lunch. Feeling fairly sulky myself, convinced my hair smelled funny and that the odd whiff of sour egg I’d scented in the air conditioned wind originated from somewhere a little too nearby for comfort, I attached myself to the end of a line.

Say what you will about the DMV; my experience of that magnificent bureaucratic institution was nothing short of marvelous. A very friendly man with a very strong accent of some sort processed my paperwork. Despite my decidedly unattractive appearance (and possibly scent), he treated me with the sympathetic courtesy normally accorded to fragile roses of intellect discovered in sewers, the same kind of discrimination last seen directed towards Babe the Talking Pig.

“You want a California license?” asked the man, after listening to my explanation with a blank face. “Why?”

California State’s driver’s licenses are numerically based; when a person asks for the driver’s license number, he’s literally asking for a number, that string of digits that the state authorities have seen fit to assign to you. The State of Washington, a proponent of interpretive English, sees fit to assign an assortment of letters and numbers as the ‘Driver’s License Number,’ a fact that never fails to raise eyebrows in more conservative California.

“No, the number,” the DMV man repeated patiently. “What it says over the word ‘number’ on your driver’s license.”

“That’s what I’m saying. H, I, R, A, T–”

In California, when a body says ‘number,’ he means something that can be added or subtracted or multiplied or divided. None of this hexa-ASCII crap for him, no sir.

“Here, give me that,” he said wearily, and plucked the license from my hand. “It’s somewhere on here. –Oh. Hm.”

“H,” I said triumphantly. “I. R. A. T–”

Then it was around the corner to have my picture taken by a flirtatious ex-Marine, who all but patted me on the head when he sent me off to take my test.

I flirted with him.

I did.

“Are you going to give me this test so I can flunk now?” I asked dolefully.

He patted my hand and made little tsking noises against the roof of his tongue. There was a line of people already forming behind me. He didn’t care. “Don’t say that,” he chided. “You’ll do fine. You will. My wife, she’s Japanese, she’s sharp as a whip. Don’t give me that. You’ll pass with flying colors.”

I took my test, whisking it triumphantly out from under the noses of waiting customers less favored than yours truly, and puttered to the back corner of the office to take the quiz.

Folks, I took that sucker home and waved it in the Guy’s face.

“You failed this test?” I demanded. Wave wave wave, flutter flutter. “How could you fail this test? Were you drunk?”

Question 1: Which of the following is true about safety belts and accidents?

1. They trap you in your car if it catches on fire in an accident.
   
2. They keep you from being thrown clear to safety, which lowers your chances of surviving accidents.
   
3. They increase your chances of survival in most types of accidents.
   

Hm.

Let me think.

All in all, it wasn’t so bad, taking the driver’s test. I got three wrong, one due to a misunderstanding of the question, and two because I just didn’t know. Fair enough. On the other hand, I needed to get six or fewer errors in order to pass. That meant I needed to get at least 30 out of 36 questions right.

Questions like this one.

When driving near road construction zones, you should:

1. Slow down to watch the construction as you pass.
   
2. Decrease your following distance.
   
3. Pass the construction zone carefully and avoid “rubbernecking.”
   

Oooh. Wait. I know this one. I know this one.

(Just give me a second….)

The ex-marine took my test and marked it, stubbornly ignoring the demands of the line of people he waved me in front of. “There,” he exclaimed when he was done. “You see? You flew past it. Fail, pshaw.”

We settled down for a comfortable little coze about retirement (his) and Hawaii, his daughter, his wife and her habit of locking herself in her bathroom, the house he’d bought his daughter in Menlo Park, his years in the service, and a fantastic allergy doctor he’d found a few blocks away. We had a grand time. He processed my papers while we talked, folding, stamping, inviting other DMV officers over to join in the conversation, then sending them off with a joke and a laugh.

Everybody else in the building probably hated my guts. But hey. I had fun.

At the end, he confiscated my Washington State License, possibly the only halfway decent picture I’ve ever had taken in 28 years. “The big wigs up in Sacramento, they’ll send you the official license when it’s ready,” he told me. He handed me a folded piece of paper that had been printed on a dot matrix printer. “It’ll take up to six weeks. In the meantime, this is your license. Don’t get pulled over or anything, dear.”

I promised faithfully not to, and bounced out of the DMV, clutching my new license in my chubby little fingers. I was now official. I was a resident of California. I had my voting registration. I could write checks. I could buy a car. I could get insurance.

It wasn’t until the following week I found out that I could also no longer go into bars.

“Picture ID?”

…oh. Crap.