To Live and Smog in MA
Yesterday, Lynn determined that she would have some time before going into Cold Stone Creamery, and as there are a number of things that we need to set up together, we figured we might opt for one of those. My choice was, of course, for the joint checking account because on the pyramid of needs, money comes in pretty high. Furthermore, there are no Wells Fargo banks in Northampton, or in all of Massachusetts for that matter, and so the ability to replenish the magical resevoir of money which supplies my ATM card is, here, impossible. This coupled with a number of student loans, the phone bill for the old place, the phone number for the new place, PG and E, Eastern Gas and Electric, Garbage, and two cable bills was tending to make my checkbook only the slightest bit rubbery.
Lynn vetoed my idea for the bank thing in favor of automobile insurance. My hope was that it was not a full scale veto, but rather a setting of precedents--her thing then mine. But alas, this was not to be the case.
Unbeknownst to either Lynn or I, Massachusetts does not believe in simply walking into a place that claims to be able to perform the service advertised on their sign and getting said service. There are things which the state wants you to do here in Massachusetts, and performing any one of those tasks inevitably must mean performing all of those tasks. Let me also point out that the insurance which I had out in California was no good. Evidently, there is nation wide, except for Massachusetts, insurance coverage and Massachusetts coverage which is regulated by the state. This is, of course, to help people from having to shop around for the "best" price on their auto insurance. There is only one price here--roughly double what I paid out in California.
Wait, there's more. You would have assumed that the hour that Lynn had to purchase auto insurance would have been enough time to perform said task. You would have assumed wrong. Once the hour was up, there was still more to do, oh much more to do, before we could consider ourselves insured, all of which was put on a time table that could only be completed by the unemployed.
A brief run down of the checklist looks something like this:
Okay, first of all, in finding Doug I stopped by three places which claimed to be able to perform the emissions test, but being that it was 12:45, nobody was at any of them, and when I say nobody, I mean nobody. Nobody was at the front desk. Nobody was in the shop. At one point I got Stephen King kind of ideas like, maybe there was a giant rabid dog waiting to chase me back to my car and sit on my hood, but there wasn't even that, so on I drove, until I found Doug's shop. There was a kid working at Doug's, so at least there I got an answer. "Lunch hour. Come back at 2:00." So, I came back at two.
At two, I found Doug busy smogging a mini-van, but unlike mechanics that you and I are used to, mechanics who take your keys and your phone number and call you when they are done, Doug accepted the woman owner of the mini-van and her child in the shop, tolerated their continuous presence as he performed various checks on their car. Being unaware of how things are done around here, I thought, 'why don't these people just leave him alone and let him do his job.' So, I'm standing in the doorway and Doug asks me what I need and I tell him that I need an emissions check and I ask him how long it will be, and he tells me forty minutes, and I ask if I should just leave the keys in the car and he says, "what fer?" "What fer?" It is at this point that my mind sort of seizes upon the idea that something is different, really different. What mechanic asks you why you are leaving him the keys? What mechanic doesn't know the answer to that question.
So, I replied, "well, you don't expect me to wait here for forty minutes." But it was clear that he did, even though I didn't. I left the keys in the car and went across the street to get some lunch at a Chinese food place. A digression for a moment--in California, the Chinese menu normally has beef, chicken, and pork on the same line, and shrimp on another (thus, Kung Pao chicken, beef, or pork is one price, and kung pao shrimp another, slightly higher, price). In Massachusetts Kung Pao beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, or scallops are all the same price. Back to Doug.
When I returned from lunch, there were five cars waiting after mine. Doug was filling my windshield-wiper fluid. "Wouldn't want to fail because you were out of wiper fluid." Fail an emissions test? Because of wiper fluid? "Uh huh," I replied in confused gratitude. I felt like the first time you learn about algebra and you think, 'yeah I'm pretty good at math. 7x8=56.' And your teacher says, "yes, well very good. Now, what if 7x=15y," and you realize that what you're calling math and what he's calling math are not the same thing.
I began to wonder what criteria of status check fell into the emissions and safety check category. Would I fail for having too much change in my seats. Would the fact that only four of my radio channels had been pre-programmed factor in my passing or failing. I could imagine Doug coming back and saying, "you're supposed to have an even number of butts in your ash tray:0, 2, 4, 8. You have seven. That won't do."
Anyways, Doug checks my tire pressure, my mirror angle, my chakras. He claps twice and then throws a ball at me--real fast like. He starts speaking backwards and records my reactions. He asks me what 7 times 8 is. Finally, he hooks my car up to a computer.
Now, all of this is taking some time, and behind me are the other five cars, and like the lady before me, they are not taking off for lunch. They will not be showing up just at the end to pay the man. They clearly know something that I do not. But it's hot and so they are all standing outside their cars, and as I am in there with Doug, they are glaring at me because I am in their way. The guy in the back looks like he's almost in tears. The woman who is next in line comes into the shop to see what's taking so long. She's not asking Doug. She's asking me.
Now the computer that Doug has hooked up to my car is not working. It gets about 75% of its readings and then stops, waits a couple minutes, and then retries. There is no way around this part of the emissions test. I offer to do jumping jacks. Doug looks at me and says, "the time when that might have made a difference is over." And for serious, I am not kidding here, he looks over at me and says, in this really accusatory voice, "You're car is not giving the computer the information that it needs," like this is somehow my fault. And hearing his tone, the woman behind him starts glaring at me even harder, now joined by a few other people who are waiting in line.
Doug says, "Oh, this is taking too long." And then, "I'd hate to fail you for how long this is taking." I am not frickin' kidding you. Somehow, whatever is wrong was my fault, like it were some kind of malicious prank that I was playing on the guy. Like I'd shit in the gas tank, just to see Doug's face when he figured out what was going wrong.
I try to apologize, but I'm not sure what I'm apologizing for, and I say, "well, what's wrong." Doug says, "well, it's stuck." Yeah, no shit it's stuck. But why? There is no specificity in Doug's answer. It's stuck. It's stopped. It's not getting any of the answers it needs. And every time he says this it's more my fault...and every time he says this, its one more step that I am going to have to do next week, after I get home from an all day teacher training, to get my car smogged by the deadline of next Thursday.
And then out of nowhere, Doug says, "this always happens with cars after 1995." Wha-wha-what? What the hell? So, the problem here is that my car isn't ten years old. The woman, now the leader of the line that is waiting for me to get out of the way, is still glaring at me. Doug asks her what year her car is. She says, "1999." So, real loud so that the crowd can hear me, I say to Doug, "So, you'll probably have trouble with her car too, huh?" and he answers, "yeah," and then he gives her a sigh which he has, up until now, reserved only for the problems related to my car. Then he says, "there's only one more thing I know to do," and he gets in my car.
While Doug is delivering the coup de grace to this test in regards to my vehicle, I shout across the garage to the woman, "how come you guys are waiting here in this heat? I went across the street and had lunch." Having realized that she will soon be the object of scorn from the people waiting in line behind her by virtue of her car's newness, she is diffused and seemingly friendly again. So she answers back, "if you leave, he just closes up shop." How's that for a work ethic. Can you imagine dropping off your car to be looked at and having the mechanic close up the shop because you didn't stay all day to keep him company while he's working on your car.
The end of this story is a happy one. The one last thing that Doug tried on my car worked. What was that last thing, you may ask? What was this jury rigging of the system that allowed Doug to circumvent tens of thousands of dollars of computerized checks and balances which my car had failed to interface with? What was this special technique that Doug was willing to employ, sticking his neck out for me as my last salvation before having to come back to try to pass my smog test again? Well, Doug put a muzzle on my exhaust, got into my car, pulled it forward two feet onto a set of wheels, and pressed the gas for about twenty seconds. I resisted the urge to yell, "yeah, you stick it to the man Doug. Those bureaucratic monkeys down at the RMV have no idea who they're fucking with," and instead agreed with Doug that it sure was a close one as I took off in my fully functioning vehicle.
Lynn vetoed my idea for the bank thing in favor of automobile insurance. My hope was that it was not a full scale veto, but rather a setting of precedents--her thing then mine. But alas, this was not to be the case.
Unbeknownst to either Lynn or I, Massachusetts does not believe in simply walking into a place that claims to be able to perform the service advertised on their sign and getting said service. There are things which the state wants you to do here in Massachusetts, and performing any one of those tasks inevitably must mean performing all of those tasks. Let me also point out that the insurance which I had out in California was no good. Evidently, there is nation wide, except for Massachusetts, insurance coverage and Massachusetts coverage which is regulated by the state. This is, of course, to help people from having to shop around for the "best" price on their auto insurance. There is only one price here--roughly double what I paid out in California.
Wait, there's more. You would have assumed that the hour that Lynn had to purchase auto insurance would have been enough time to perform said task. You would have assumed wrong. Once the hour was up, there was still more to do, oh much more to do, before we could consider ourselves insured, all of which was put on a time table that could only be completed by the unemployed.
A brief run down of the checklist looks something like this:
- In order for the insurance to kick in the car must be registered in the state of Massachusetts ($90) and must be photographed by a registered vehicle collision inspector--you have five days to perform this operation.
- In order to register your car in the state of Massachusetts, you must have insurance pending, a Massachusetts state drivers license ($90), and pass an emissions and safety test ($29). You have seven days to perform this operation.
- In order to get a Massachusetts state drivers license, you must have a DL from another state, a social security card, and proof of residency. I've bolded the last one, because it is of course this detail that you will inevitably not know to bring, and so you will have to go home, get your lease, and drive back to the RMV (not DMV) where you will have to, once again, wait in line. You have twenty days from the time of your residency to procure a Massachusetts state drivers license.
- The Vehicle Collisions Inspector requires very little in way of monetary compensation to take snap shots of your car, but they are not always open. You must check the times for this one. Also importantly, VCI's do not work at places where they do emissions checks. It is impossible to kill two birds with one stone on this one.
- Lastly, the emissions guy really doesn't need much besides your money and your registration.
So, given that I will be training to be a teacher all next week and Lynn will be opening the ice cream parlor. I had yesterday and today to get all of this done. Luckily, I do not currently have a job. But needless to say, I've been running all over the frickin' place both days. Two trips to the RMV is enough to kill anyone, and as you can probably tell from the details provided above, it was finally necessary for us to open a bank account in order for me to continue with the titillating job of making it legal for me to drive in this state.
I have only, now, finally completed the last stage in this process, the emissions and safety test, and it is that experience, fresh in my memory, that I would like to share with you. I'm going to call the emission's guy Doug, because he had the same crappy comb over as a guy I used to know named Doug. Don't let that paint a bad image, Doug was an okay guy.Okay, first of all, in finding Doug I stopped by three places which claimed to be able to perform the emissions test, but being that it was 12:45, nobody was at any of them, and when I say nobody, I mean nobody. Nobody was at the front desk. Nobody was in the shop. At one point I got Stephen King kind of ideas like, maybe there was a giant rabid dog waiting to chase me back to my car and sit on my hood, but there wasn't even that, so on I drove, until I found Doug's shop. There was a kid working at Doug's, so at least there I got an answer. "Lunch hour. Come back at 2:00." So, I came back at two.
At two, I found Doug busy smogging a mini-van, but unlike mechanics that you and I are used to, mechanics who take your keys and your phone number and call you when they are done, Doug accepted the woman owner of the mini-van and her child in the shop, tolerated their continuous presence as he performed various checks on their car. Being unaware of how things are done around here, I thought, 'why don't these people just leave him alone and let him do his job.' So, I'm standing in the doorway and Doug asks me what I need and I tell him that I need an emissions check and I ask him how long it will be, and he tells me forty minutes, and I ask if I should just leave the keys in the car and he says, "what fer?" "What fer?" It is at this point that my mind sort of seizes upon the idea that something is different, really different. What mechanic asks you why you are leaving him the keys? What mechanic doesn't know the answer to that question.
So, I replied, "well, you don't expect me to wait here for forty minutes." But it was clear that he did, even though I didn't. I left the keys in the car and went across the street to get some lunch at a Chinese food place. A digression for a moment--in California, the Chinese menu normally has beef, chicken, and pork on the same line, and shrimp on another (thus, Kung Pao chicken, beef, or pork is one price, and kung pao shrimp another, slightly higher, price). In Massachusetts Kung Pao beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, or scallops are all the same price. Back to Doug.
When I returned from lunch, there were five cars waiting after mine. Doug was filling my windshield-wiper fluid. "Wouldn't want to fail because you were out of wiper fluid." Fail an emissions test? Because of wiper fluid? "Uh huh," I replied in confused gratitude. I felt like the first time you learn about algebra and you think, 'yeah I'm pretty good at math. 7x8=56.' And your teacher says, "yes, well very good. Now, what if 7x=15y," and you realize that what you're calling math and what he's calling math are not the same thing.
I began to wonder what criteria of status check fell into the emissions and safety check category. Would I fail for having too much change in my seats. Would the fact that only four of my radio channels had been pre-programmed factor in my passing or failing. I could imagine Doug coming back and saying, "you're supposed to have an even number of butts in your ash tray:0, 2, 4, 8. You have seven. That won't do."
Anyways, Doug checks my tire pressure, my mirror angle, my chakras. He claps twice and then throws a ball at me--real fast like. He starts speaking backwards and records my reactions. He asks me what 7 times 8 is. Finally, he hooks my car up to a computer.
Now, all of this is taking some time, and behind me are the other five cars, and like the lady before me, they are not taking off for lunch. They will not be showing up just at the end to pay the man. They clearly know something that I do not. But it's hot and so they are all standing outside their cars, and as I am in there with Doug, they are glaring at me because I am in their way. The guy in the back looks like he's almost in tears. The woman who is next in line comes into the shop to see what's taking so long. She's not asking Doug. She's asking me.
Now the computer that Doug has hooked up to my car is not working. It gets about 75% of its readings and then stops, waits a couple minutes, and then retries. There is no way around this part of the emissions test. I offer to do jumping jacks. Doug looks at me and says, "the time when that might have made a difference is over." And for serious, I am not kidding here, he looks over at me and says, in this really accusatory voice, "You're car is not giving the computer the information that it needs," like this is somehow my fault. And hearing his tone, the woman behind him starts glaring at me even harder, now joined by a few other people who are waiting in line.
Doug says, "Oh, this is taking too long." And then, "I'd hate to fail you for how long this is taking." I am not frickin' kidding you. Somehow, whatever is wrong was my fault, like it were some kind of malicious prank that I was playing on the guy. Like I'd shit in the gas tank, just to see Doug's face when he figured out what was going wrong.
I try to apologize, but I'm not sure what I'm apologizing for, and I say, "well, what's wrong." Doug says, "well, it's stuck." Yeah, no shit it's stuck. But why? There is no specificity in Doug's answer. It's stuck. It's stopped. It's not getting any of the answers it needs. And every time he says this it's more my fault...and every time he says this, its one more step that I am going to have to do next week, after I get home from an all day teacher training, to get my car smogged by the deadline of next Thursday.
And then out of nowhere, Doug says, "this always happens with cars after 1995." Wha-wha-what? What the hell? So, the problem here is that my car isn't ten years old. The woman, now the leader of the line that is waiting for me to get out of the way, is still glaring at me. Doug asks her what year her car is. She says, "1999." So, real loud so that the crowd can hear me, I say to Doug, "So, you'll probably have trouble with her car too, huh?" and he answers, "yeah," and then he gives her a sigh which he has, up until now, reserved only for the problems related to my car. Then he says, "there's only one more thing I know to do," and he gets in my car.
While Doug is delivering the coup de grace to this test in regards to my vehicle, I shout across the garage to the woman, "how come you guys are waiting here in this heat? I went across the street and had lunch." Having realized that she will soon be the object of scorn from the people waiting in line behind her by virtue of her car's newness, she is diffused and seemingly friendly again. So she answers back, "if you leave, he just closes up shop." How's that for a work ethic. Can you imagine dropping off your car to be looked at and having the mechanic close up the shop because you didn't stay all day to keep him company while he's working on your car.
The end of this story is a happy one. The one last thing that Doug tried on my car worked. What was that last thing, you may ask? What was this jury rigging of the system that allowed Doug to circumvent tens of thousands of dollars of computerized checks and balances which my car had failed to interface with? What was this special technique that Doug was willing to employ, sticking his neck out for me as my last salvation before having to come back to try to pass my smog test again? Well, Doug put a muzzle on my exhaust, got into my car, pulled it forward two feet onto a set of wheels, and pressed the gas for about twenty seconds. I resisted the urge to yell, "yeah, you stick it to the man Doug. Those bureaucratic monkeys down at the RMV have no idea who they're fucking with," and instead agreed with Doug that it sure was a close one as I took off in my fully functioning vehicle.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
2:41 PM
2 Comments:
>My hope was that it was not a full scale veto, but rather a >setting of precedents--her thing then mine.
Which, let the record show, is indeed how it happened -- we got our bank account later that same afternoon, a full day before Brian had his, uhm, emissions debacle.
Glad to see a sign of dissent from the other side. Compromise, Compromise.
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