Happy

One of the happy fun things I got to do on my birthday yesterday was to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver’s license. By a combination of silly hours, bad planning and general stupidity on my part, I was forced to do this on the day my license was set to expire. When I arrived and saw how packed the parking lot was, I knew I was in for a nice long wait.

The particular office I went to has recently been built and in a very uncharacteristic bureaucratic twist, the facility was designed with efficiency and intelligence in mind. When you walk into the building you are greeted at a reception desk where one person helps you identify which area you need and insures that you have the proper documentation before you can “take a number” from their automated system. The number prints out on a little piece of thermal paper and my number was 472. They were currently serving 364. That meant that there were 108 people and their families ahead of me and they were overflowing the usually more than ample seating area in front of the teller windows.

This monstrous wait (compounded by my stupidity) was threatening to make me late for my birthday dinner w/GF. I found myself standing in a talkative group of people and I joked that next week I planned to arrive early, get a ticket, and come back later and sell it to the highest bidder. Then I mentioned that it would be worth it to go to the front of the seating area and offer $20 for a ticket in the low 400’s in exchange for mine. And then the strange thing happened. The girl next to me offered me her ticket, number 426. It seems that before I arrived, someone got frustrated and tired of waiting and decided to leave. But before they did, they offered their ticket to someone else. She in turn passed hers on to the girl who had given me her ticket and of course, I passed mine on to the guy next to me who was overjoyed to score a ticket a mere 14 before his own. He passed his on and I’m sure the cycle continued. Less than an hour after arriving, I was on my way out the door with my new driver’s license in hand. And I was happy.

And so, one frustrated person made a whole bunch of other people happy.

(I’m sure there is a sad commentary in this story when an hour spent waiting at dmv on your birthday makes you happy.)