Went in to the Department of Licensing (DOL) to renew the tabs on the car today which went fairly smoothly. One very interesting thing is that Washington citizens are now required to show a valid drivers license in order to renew their car tabs. Not sure what problem they are trying to solve here, if someone is driving around with an expired license then when the police pull them over they will be punished. Why should having a properly licensed vehicle require the registered owner to have a valid drivers license? I could very well be registering the car so my child could use it and I no longer drive for whatever reason.
What is truly amazing here is that this is the same department that issues said drivers license, seems like they could easily check this themselves. When I pointed this out to the person behind the counter I was told that at an earlier time DOL had spent 39 million dollars to try to connect the two databases and the process failed. This is just truly amazing, how hard is it to add a new field to the car tab database where the registered owners drivers license is stored and then create a process which would check said license against the drivers license database. Something like this should not take longer than a month to put together, lets give them 3 months since they are an odious bureaucracy who the Vogons would be impressed by. Certainly not 39 million dollars worth of work here.
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