It’s official!

After only:
• three weeks
• three phone calls
• two trips
• three separate checks
• three filled-out forms (pressing firmly for the duplicates!) and
• four relatively short lines in two different buildings,
my fabulous new Big Boy Car is now officially a resident of Chicago.

Let us commence celebrating.

The three-week wait stems from an epic surge of projects that has kept me at work—and unavailable to go stand in all those lines even for two business hours—late into most nights for the last couple months.

The two trips stem from the fact that my dealership neglected to give me a Very Important Document that was the critical first step in getting my car licensed and registered and stickered when I finally made it to the DMV last Friday. So once the VID was found, FedExed and in my hands I went back this morning and got everything taken care of.

Except there’s this receipt for my city sticker, see, that’s housed in a folder where I store the documents I’ll need when I do my taxes next spring. Had it even occurred to me to bring the receipt to the DMV—which it hadn’t, obviously—I could have gotten a $50 credit on the cost of my new city sticker. But I decided the promise of having all this form-filling and line-waiting and building-hopping over and done with NOW was worth $50, so I just forked over the full payment and got on with my life.

In refreshing counterpoint to all this needless bureaucratic cocksuckery document-locating and line-standing, the people at the DMV were actually very nice and very helpful … but if they didn’t have thick foreign accents, they sure went out of their way to mumble.

Now, I’m thrilled when foreign nationals come to America and find a way to blend their cultures and ours and land jobs and succeed here. I look at their accents—even the nearly impenetrable ones—as part of the great celebration-of-cultures-and-peoples fabric of blue state America. Seriously. But if you were born in America and grew up in America and speak English as your native language—and if you work in the public sector where you use your mouth to communicate with people all day as a key part of your chosen profession—SPEAK THE FUCK UP.

I know that makes me sound like I’m gonna run out and start one of those “Take Back America!” petitions that declares English the official language and heterosexuality the official fight song and Dubya the Exalted Supreme Leader, but really: Am I asking too much here?

There’s a distinct—and profoundly useful—difference between “wabkhsyrln” and “what bank has your loan?” And if a fine, upstanding, enunciation-enabled citizen has to ask you to repeat your lazy-ass “wabkhsyrln” THREE TIMES, you clearly have a problem providing the minimum skills required for doing your job.

And, believe me, you WILL be blogged about.

Or perhaps I should say: yuwlbblgdbt.