By Cambrey Thomas
People come to the Department of Motor Vehicles to wait.
On a recent afternoon at the department’s downtown Brooklyn offices at the Atlantic Avenue shopping center — next to National Vision Center, and on the same floor as Marshall’s and Target – people were still arriving at 2:30 PM to take numbers and wait to be called. And as they waited, they became listless, they became angry, they calmed down, and they became licensed drivers.
They waited on wooden benches. The space, so sprawling it could have been yet another store in the shopping center, was crowded but so large that the ambient noise merely echoed.
There were fathers with kids waiting as well as elderly ladies who wore wigs and carried canes. They all carried had IDs and passports, identification documents from here and abroad.
An automated woman’s voice interrupted the waiting by advising yet another person that their turn had come: “Now serving F 811 to window 37.” Everyone else was left to check their status on the automated counters next to the flat screen television monitors that hung from the ceiling. The monitors played ads for Enhanced Drivers Licenses and public service announcements about teen driving safety.
“Where’s window 15?” asked a man wearing an all denim and a black cap. After finding it, he cheerfully asked the woman behind the window how her day was, before, a few minutes later, yelling “No!”
“I came down here to get…” he said as his trailed off. He started waving a $10 bill. The woman behind the window walked away and gestured big with her hands to her supervisor.
She returned to the window and stared at the man.
“Whatever you got to say, look…,” he began. But before he could finish his sentence, she took the $10 bill from his hand and handed him a temporary license. “Oh, how many days till my real one arrives in the mail?” Above this interaction, the flat screen television showed the top 10 songs on iTunes.
Moments later, the automated voice announced that number 742 was due at window 18. No one walked up, so the woman behind this window called for number 743. A young man in a hooded sweatshirt approached the window and handed over his money. The woman, who suspected something was amiss, called her boss over to inspect the bill he had given her. She held it up to the light for a few seconds to check its authenticity before accepting it.
On the far side of the vast room people were taking their written drivers tests and standing before the camera for ID photos. A young Hasidic man stood at the front of the line to wait for his driver’s license. The automated voice summoned number F 813 to window and then 37 to F 824, freeing two more people from their waiting.
“There’s no J! Hey! There’s no J,” said a little boy seated at one of the benches. Behind the boy, a California woman clutched her passport and ID along with an application for a New York driver’s license. She quickly snapped on her gum as she looked over the stamps in her passport.
J 815 flashed on an overhead screen.
“Oh, I see J now. Look Carlos, J 815,” he said before going back to playing with his action figure. Carlos, an older man, could have been the boy’s father.
“Number 817,” the boy said a few minutes later. “Get ready.”
“We lost it. We lost the ticket,” said Carlos jokingly.
“Well, it’s not even your turn yet,” the boy said. The number on the board flashed to 818. Carlos took off toward the window and the boy sat down.
Back at the front of the line the Hasidic man dusted off his shoulders and adjusted his suit – readying himself for the photograph.
Against the clear window of the written test room, a woman was waiting for her teenage daughter.
The teenage girl suddenly popped up from her seat and walked out of the test room. She smiled and snapped her fingers. The two sat together on the bench and talked quietly against the many chattering voices around them. A man in a hooded sweatshirt walked by them slowly. He clutched a crumpled black plastic bag.
“You ladies need pepper spray, pepper spray, pepper spray,” he asked. He held up two small cans of pepper spray but found no takers.
It was now 4 P.M. Suddenly there was a loud mechanical noise. The entrance gates were being lowered one by one, leaving only a turnstile exit monitored by two guards. But even as the office began to close there were still people everywhere.
Prepared to wait awhile longer, the woman waiting with her teenage daughter pulled out a New Yorker magazine while her daughter rummaged thorough her button-covered backpack.
From behind the desk, a woman shouted, “If you don’t clean up your mess the cleaners won’t wipe the window down.” Whoever she was shouting at was out of sight, but she could have just as well been yelling at everyone. There was a quick laugh from others behind the window before she shouted out again. “I wouldn’t wipe it down if there were papers everywhere.” There was a pause before she shouted. “How do you know? You’re not here at night.”
She wasn’t done. A few minutes later she was shouting again. “I need Swiffers,” she yelled. The Swiffer, a type of mop, was apparently in short supply as the DMV prepared to close for the night.
The woman and the teenager were finally called up to a window. A few minutes later they walked towards the exit together. “Congratulations,” said the woman.
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