Licensed to Kill (almost)

Since we are here for the long term, Washington State kindly gives us 30 days to get a license or stop driving. So a little less than three weeks later, Pearl and I are down at the DoL queue waiting in line. No not the Dole (unemployment benefit) queue, the deparment of licensing. Actually Pearl went first. She waited all of 10 minutes to get served, sat her license, passed and then was pretty much out of there.

I went down today after checking out the queue length at the Bellevue office, which was supposed to be 0 minutes. I get there and pick up a ticket which had the number 82 on it. Looking up at the counters to see what number they were up to, I was horrified that it said 40. After an hour of waiting they were getting close. I happened to check the little notice above the testing machines. After sitting the test, I needed to get another ticket and wait to be served again. So I quickly grabbed another ticket, number 144, sigh.... it was going to be a long day.

When my first number came up, I was so lucky as to get the grumpiest person serving. She chewed me out for forgetting to put the apartment number on my address. Then when I took the eye exam, I didn't see any of the text on the left hand side, so I asked "Am I supposed to close one eye?" and she snapped back "Do you drive with one eye?". So I closed my right eye to try and find the missing text. The problem was that I couldn't converge my eyes correctly to see the text. So I faked it by using one eye and then the other to read the letters. I am not going to fail this because of some stupid eye test that doesn't really work. The test itself was fairly easy, but I apparently know nothing about headlights and distance because flunked those two questions.

So come the first week of March both Pearl and I will sit our practical exams. Between now and then we will be busy practising our parallel parks with the new car. Taking a driving test in the van will be a challenge, it is so hard to stay under the 30MPH limit with a V6.