Has anyone ever had a good experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)? Between long wait times, missing paperwork, and the occasional food spill, students can agree—the DMV is the place where happiness goes to die. Students shared their DMV horror stories, each worse than the last.
While everyone knows the DMV can mean long hours of waiting, junior Marco Palacios had a particularly grueling experience. “I waited eight hours in the DMV just to let me know that I failed my permit test on the question, ‘Can you leave a baby in a car?’” he said.
“I got there, but the line was already crazy long, and it just wasn’t moving,” senior Bryan Anaya said. When he finally reached the front, he found out he was missing a document to prove his address. “So I just wasted almost three hours waiting in line just to get sent back home.”
Junior Edgar Moreno Serrato went to the DMV to get an ID, but objected to the document requirements. “How the h*ll am I supposed to give you my identification and get my identification from the DMV?” he said. In typical DMV fashion, he had to return a second time due to excess demand.
Junior Jasmine Shakirova arrived at the DMV early, thinking the line would be manageable at 7 a.m. “I had to wait three hours for them to even call my number,” she said. In a ‘surprising’ turn of events, she was sent back due to an error with her documents. “I had to come back the next day and do it all over again.”
“They wasted five hours of my time,” junior Filip Andreasson said. His experience was a two day ordeal of waiting and a missing document. “They didn’t even state it was necessary on the DMV website,” he added.
“I sat there for an hour waiting to take my [driver’s] test,” senior Lina Arizini said. She recalled a rushed test experience, at the end of which she still received her license. “I feel like that says a lot about how bad the actual [license process] is,” she said.
However, not everyone’s experience was so serious. Sophomore Yasuo Reyes accompanied his brother to the DMV, where he accidentally dropped his ice cream on the ground. When he was asked to clean it up, he was frustrated by the tool he was given—a broom, which couldn’t properly clean the spill. “I tried suing them, but my friends didn’t allow me. They called me stupid,” he explained.
