Purgatory

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Thus should be engraved above the entrance to the downtown office of the Washington Department of Licensing. Once every five years, I'm forced to pass through that dire portal. Inside ... the land of the walking undead.

Time to renew my driver's license.

Five windows, like tellers' windows in a bank, face me as I enter. Only two windows, of course, are manned. In the open space in front of the windows, seated on ancient folding chairs like masses of frightened immigrants on Ellis Island, are huddled the uncomprehending supplicants -- Washington taxpayers hoping against hope that some obscure technicality won't bar them from obtaining their license. Many, I observe, hope in vain.

For I had time to watch their travails. Oh, I had time all right. In a rare display of bureaucratic efficiency, I'm instructed upon entering to press a button and receive a number. My number is 244. The two windows are currently serving numbers 213 and 215.

It's going to be one of those days.

As time passes, first one ghastly pale priest of the Bureaucracy and then another drifts in. They open up two of the unused windows. Several "customers" get served. For a moment, hope almost seems possible. Then two of the peoples' servants begin discussing some matter between themselves. No one new is called to either of their windows. Eventually, a hundred eyes burning holes in them, they wander off. They're never seen again.

We are back to two windows. Well, really only one and a half. One of the two remaining workers doubles as a part time photographer. When she gets bored, or sees too many applicants crowding the photography waiting area, she shuts down her window, takes a break from paper shuffling, and begins expressing her creative side by taking mug shots.

Finally, #244 is called. I pay my money. I look deep into some governmental version of an optical instrument, and somehow prove that I can see. I wait for another ten minutes to be photographed.

It's over. For me, this Stygian nightmare comes only once every five years. But for the governmental zombies who run that dismal pavilion, it's all in a day's work. Each day. Every day. For years upon mind-numbing years.

Not Dante's Hell perhaps, but certainly Purgatory.