When it comes to government agencies and bureaucracies (but I repeat myself), everyone’s favorite whipping boy is often the California Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV for short. Among federal agencies the US Postal Service, Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and even Congress (shock!) make a target-rich environment for criticism, but even then the DMV tends to stand out. Whenever someone warns against government taking over another part of the US economy or another area of our life, they often invoke the DMV as an example of government making things bad and then, when then try to fix it, making it worse.
The DMV situation may be more nuanced than you realize, though. We recently went through several driving tests at a nearby DMV office, and came to realize that some parts of the DMV work very well even while others don’t. Hence the title of this blog post.
Imagine for a moment that you reach the age when you can no longer renew your driver’s license on line. Instead, you need to go to the DMV and take a test. That’s where the trouble begins.
The first test is often a simple vision exam. After you wait your turn, you step up to the counter and the agent tells you to read a row of random letters from chart A, B, or C. The charts are plain black letters on a clean white background, but you discover that you can’t read them. Why not? Maybe your eyesight is not as good as it used to be, so you get a note from your optometrist and take a driving test to prove that you can still see kids in a crosswalk, etc. Or maybe your eyesight is still pretty good, but you wear bifocals and the charts hang up near the ceiling such that you can’t see them properly through your glasses. Kids in crosswalks are not up near the ceiling, but the eye charts are, so you fail the test.
The next test might involve a series of questions on a computer screen. However, the instructions are incomplete (particularly if you tend to overthink things), the questions might seem to come from rules for commercial truck drivers rather than for your kind of driving, and the screen font might be hard to read. Here we go with those bifocals again, especially if the screen is too high or too low for you, and nobody thought to provide a height adjustment. That’s not the end of the problems, though, since the scroll bars to get to the next question are off the screen and can’t be found. Maybe you fail that test, too.
At this point you begin to think the system is set up to minimize your odds for renewing your license. Not a good day, and after several tries it feels like the worst of times. But at this point something good comes into play, and that would be many of the people who work at the DMV. They may be stuck in a less than optimum system with balky computers in a cluttered bureaucratic office, but they still do their best, try to help you, respond well to being treated with courtesy and respect, and can be your lifeline to turn this worst of times into something better.
The greeter at the door, for example, triages all kinds of personalities, problems, and some amazing make-your-eyes-fall-out kinds of questions but without losing her poise or purpose. A friendly smile and acknowledgement gets a smile and effective help in return as she routes you through the system and sends you to the agent you need. As you move on, your sincere thank-you sets the stage nicely for the next person coming in the door.
The agent, in turn, holds your driving future in their hands as they assess your situation and help you through the forms and fees. Again, a friendly smile and introduction starts the conversation as the agent poses questions, collects data, and explains your options. Then it is off to the next steps in the license renewal process, but with friendly working relationships in place as a backstop. We even had a friendly agent call us back to her window to get a better picture for the driver’s license because she did want us to have to live with the photo that made us look like a gargoyle. Talk about going above and beyond the call of duty!
So what’s the point? Nothing special. Just that the DMV can be surprisingly awful or surprisingly good, depending on the people. And that is where people skills become so important. The office set-up, equipment, and tests may be out of date, hard to navigate, or even misleading, but people can make all the difference, and can turn a difficult situation into a viable path to a renewed license. Don’t believe me? You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and a few ounces of kindness and courtesy can go a long way, even at the DMV!