In the mail today: State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, a collection that proudly announces on the cover that it features “50 writers on 50 states.” There’s a nice batch of writers essayifying on Georgia (Ha Jin), Maryland (Myla Goldberg), Ohio (Susan Orlean), and so on. Better still, D.C. didn’t get neglected: The book’s afterword is an interview with Edward P. Jones. The novelist and short story writer mostly expounds soberly on the District’s institutionalized racism, but his chat with Cressida Leyson ends on a more wistful note:

Do you ever wish that you belonged to a state?

No, I think I’ve just wished that we had the same rights that everyone else has…. I think it may have been ten years ago when this started, but D.C. license plates now have the phrase, “Taxation without representation.” I don’t have a car, but I think one of these days I’m going to find out a way to get one of those license plates just for myself.

Jones will take part in a signing and discussion of the book on September 16 at the Library of Congress; the event will also include a screening of a short film related to the book.

Last Saturday, I figured I’d take advantage of the D.C. DMV’s expansive hours for automobile inspections. I set out for the Half Street SW inspection site just before 11 a.m., expecting, perhaps, to wait a bit before handing over the car to a friendly inspector.

Best laid plans. The line just to get on the grounds of the station snaked around nearly three blocks. Figuring I could brave a wait, I queued up. Twenty minutes later, I hadn’t moved. And ten minutes after that, I was at Costco.

Though I am sure that some DMV inspectors are enjoying vacations at this time of year, I hold the department harmless. The agency’s Web site, after all, features this warning:

The best times to visit the station are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday afternoons from 3 pm - 6 pm. Customers are advised that the days before and after a holiday and most Saturdays are especially busy due to many customers being off from work.

But what’s with this inspection appointment service? Anybody ever tried it?

Early this year I received a flurry of scary, red-stamped collection notices from the DMV. There were tickets for parking my Vespa on the sidewalk–which is legal, according to a document I got from the DMV after the first time I got a ticket and contested it at an in-person hearing–and one unbelievable ticket for parking during street cleaning–which is impossible since I park on the sidewalk, legally. I was so angry and tired of wasting my time that I wrote a very polite letter requesting a review of the tickets. Well, it took months, but I finally got an answer: the tickets have been dismissed. Of course, after that letter came, I received my registration renewal packet from the DMV, which included a note that I need to pay up on my tickets.

Ever since I purchased my new-to-me Toyota Corolla, I’ve tried to be a semi-careful driver. I can be crazy on 295. And I have been busted multiple times for all but ignoring stop signs. But at least with this new car, I obeyed most signs most of the time. I avoided hitting pedestrians. I haven’t parked illegally. I’ve been careful to slow down at the traffic camera on upper 16th. I sometimes even clicked on my turn signal when changing lanes.

But a few nights ago, two drivers rode my bumper and honked their horns. I didn’t know why they were honking at me. I thought about my driving etiquette. I didn’t think I fucked those drivers over. I didn’t cut them off. I didn’t turn my Corolla into a pace car.

And then last night I realized what these citizens were honking at. They were honking at the space where my paper tag used to be. They were trying to tell me I was driving without tags. They were trying to tell me my temp tag had been stolen.

So thanks to the good citizens for trying to warn me that I had been driving illegally all this time.

Well, I decided to fight those phantom tickets.

Headed down to 301 C Street at about 3:15, walked into the hearing registration room, waited about 10 minutes, was sent to a hearing room, waited another 15 minutes for a half-dozen other folks, then got my hearing, which took all of about five minutes.

The skinny: Within an hour, I got all my late fees knocked off! And one of the duplicate tickets was dismissed!

Instead of $365, I now owe a mere $190. Only bad parts: The credit-card system was down, so I couldn’t actually pay the bill, and the examiner wouldn’t waive the $50 boot fee, seeing as I still had two boot-eligible tickets—even though those were tickets I would have paid promptly had I known about them.

Here’s to you, Hearing Examiner Stephen Reichert: You are the very picture of judicial wisdom and reasoned insight.

Sonuvabitch! Just walked past my car on the way to the office and I’ve been booted.

I got an expired-meter ticket about two weeks ago which I haven’t paid just yet, but I’m thinking, That sure as hell isn’t enough to get me the boot!

So I logged on to the city’s online ticketing system and punched in my plate. This is what I got:

The following tickets issued to this vehicle plate are due:

Ticket Number Issue Date Violation Location Amount
370199314 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
370709931 10/24/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK E ST NW SOUTH SIDE $50.00
370728256 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
371249830 11/19/2007 P173 1400 BLOCK BELMONT ST NW NORTH SIDE $60.00
372899295 11/27/2007 P173 1300 BLOCK W ST NW SOUTH SIDE $60.00
373726404 12/14/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK 11TH ST NW EAST SIDE $25.00

GODDAMMIT! OK, I remember the last one. But swear to God I never saw any of those other five tickets. One or two tickets I could see getting blown away by the wind or stolen by some asshole, but FIVE? Plus, one of those seems to be a duplicate—can I really get ticketed on the same day on the same block. And I know which block that is! The east side of the 2300 block of 15th doesn’t have street sweeping restrictions! It’s on the goddamned hill next to Meridian Hill Park!!!

Christ!

Anyway, now I gotta decide whether I wanna spend almost $400 paying for tickets and late fees I never knew I had or going down to C Street and hoping the line for hearings isn’t too ridiculous.

Your input is appreciated.

All David Lippe, 44, wanted to do was re-register his 2005 Volkswagen Jetta. But when he tried in mid-November to take care of that routine business online with the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, he repeatedly got an error message.

He went through the steps about six times before finally reaching the DMV’s IT department. An employee walked him through the procedure and also got an error message. But the employee had a solution to the problem: Lippe was told to register his Jetta by mail.

Unfortunately, one entity believed his attempts had been successful—his credit card company. In fact, it showed that his car had been registered 25 times at $199 a pop. “This is potentially eating into my Christmas spending,” he says. “What if my partner doesn’t get a gift? Will the District give him a gift?”

Janis Hazel, DMV’s public information officer, says her department has no record of charging Lippe for his registration at all. Lippe counters with his credit card bill. With five days of holiday shopping left, the DMV finally cleared up the issues.

After the holiday, Lippe says he mailed in a check for his registration and now vows never to use dc.gov’s services again. “This was an extremely isolated incident,” Hazel says. “We’ve not had an incident like this previously.”

I just got word last night that my beautiful 2001 Toyota Corolla (color according to the carmaker: “Lemon Mist“) will cost more than $10,000 to repair. In insurance lingo, this means my car is a “total loss.” For me, this means that I now have to go the mechanic shop on Michigan Avenue and clean out my car.

The mechanic said I have until Friday morning to complete this car cleaning. This task includes clearing out the dozen empty water bottles, piles of fading newspapers, and dozens of mixtapes. It also means carting away the giant trash bag in my trunk. This particular trash bag is filled with the refuse from my last car I junked five years ago.

I have never really looked inside that bag in all those years. I know there’s some good stuff in that bag: more mixtapes, a classic CD or three, a couple of t-shirts, special must-have papers, old batteries, and maybe a shoe.

Do I make a clean break and simply throw the entire bag out? Do I bother sifting through these five-year old artifacts?

Readers help me out with snarky jokes and helpful suggestions.

A poster to Yahoo’s TakomaDC group generated some traffic yesterday when she asked people how they get old DMV registration stickers off their windshields. “Is it just a matter of huge quantities of patience with a utility knife?” she wondered. “These things are a bear!”

Another poster forwarded the following tip, which someone else had sent her a few years back when she’d faced the same problem:

I have had some success with this method. I use a product called Goo Gone (you can get it at CVS or a supermarket). It’s an oily liquid that smells like citrus. I make a pad out of a couple of paper towels and saturate it with the stuff. Then I squirt a lot of the liquid on the sticker itself. I tape the pad to the sticker, so the sticker is soaking in the stuff. I leave it overnight, then leave the car in the sun for about an hour so the sticker warms up. You still have to scrape, but at least it comes off.

I think the DC DMV needs to consult with NASA. If they used the same glue on the tiles on the space shuttle, they wouldn’t have any problems. It’s almost indestructable.

That didn’t keep more advice from pouring in yesterday. Try outsourcing, suggests another poster:

I normally go to a gas station where they have great scrapers for taking off such stickers. It usually takes one of the mechanics less than 2 minutes to get the entire sticker off - I tip them a few bucks and I’m on my way!

Recommends another poster:

You can also try rubber cement thinner. The major brand name is “Bestine” and can be found in any art or arts & crafts store. Essentially you soak the sticker in Bestine and then scape it off. The process takes several minutes, versus the overnight soaking with Goo Be Gone.

I don’t own a car, so I don’t get what the big deal is. Can any drivers out there shed light on this? Just how stubborn are those stickers?

Friday morning, I went to the DMV. And it was great.

This should come as no surprise, really, seeing as the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles has made great strides in customer service over the past few years.

But the news is that the DMV opened a new service center in April on the unit block of M Street SW. It’s very nice.

Best thing about M Street: plenty of free parking. Used to be if you wanted to park the car you were there to register/entitle, you had to head across the river to Penn Branch (also not a bad facility, incidentally) or take your chances in Georgetown or Judiciary Square. But M Street’s got a nice freshly paved, clearly signed lot out front. Sweet.

Other nice thing: brightly lit, comfortable waiting area with plenty of natural light. Devotees of the old C Street outpost will find this a nice change of pace. And M Street has at least five flat-screen TVs. Unfortunately, all of them display the wait-numbering system rather than entertainment. Hey guys, can’t you put on some Ken Burns documentaries, a la the Superior Court jury room?

My wait, to register a change of address at about 10:30 in the morning, was about 20 minutes, so I wasn’t too desparate for video entertainment.

One thing that hasn’t changed: No service with a smile. Still, the three people I dealt with (one to make sure I had what I needed, one to enter my new address into the computer, one to take my picture and make my new license) were all direct, clear, and efficient.

But if you do know how to smile, take note: They’re hiring.

Although service at the DMV has improved over the years, the insufferable waits and seemingly uncaring attitudes of employees at the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles during its heyday of dysfunction still get played for laughs all the time. Act cleaned up or not, our DMV has sucked up enough citizens’ money, work hours, and happiness over the years to justify an eternity of pot shots. But a recent parody of the agency has accomplished the impossible: It almost makes you feel bad for the men and women staffing our most maligned of city agencies.

Nicholas McKenna, a 25-year-old District resident, has created an online spoof of the D.C. DMV that has been live since January. The fully functioning site, which looks an awful lot like dmv.dc.gov, complete with working phone numbers and forms, pokes fun at DMV wait times (measured in days and hours rather than minutes), the infinite forms of identification that must be presented in order to obtain a D.C. license, and everyone’s favorite vehicular ass-kicking, the boot. But in addition to the more mundane take-down of operations, the satire features some racially charged stabs at DMV employees and outlets.

A “Message From the DMV Director,” written by fictional agency head Shae Kims, is all broken English and misspelled words. The letter tells residents that “Everyday, we is thinking of new services and featurs to be makeing the DC DMV a better place to live, work, and play.” A “DC DMV Star Employees page” gives biographical info on some of the faux workers, including a “former prostitute” and “recovering cocaine addict,” each of which is accompanied by an actual mug shot of a black woman. Among the services offered at the mythical “Anacostia Branch” is a fried-chicken menu.

With the exception of a piece about two white women, escapees from an Alabama prison who have held up the Anacostia Branch, and “Owen Parker,” “one of the most popular employees at the DuPont Circle Branch” who’s in charge of “making sure the olives are stocked in the martini bar,” all of McKenna’s characters are black. “I’m not a bigot,” says McKenna, who works for a digital mapping company by day and cooks up Web parodies in his spare time. “I have friends everywhere, grew up with all kinds of people, all kinds of food, but a good parody has to be detailed.”

McKenna, who is half-white and half-Asian, says that interactions with the world’s people, through a childhood spent in Saudi Arabia and a diverse group of friends, informs a lot of the stuff on the site. The fried-chicken menu, with its hot wings and chitlins platters, he says, got some of its spice courtesy of an African-American friend. “My friend Gary is black, he lives in Rockville, and I’ve gone to their family reunion.”

“It’s poking fun at stereotypes,” McKenna says. “I’m not racist. Well, maybe I am, because I do it to everybody.”

McKenna’s attempts at equal-opportunity request include a soon-to-be-public fake campaign site for “Delores Redd,” an imaginary dark-horse Republican D.C. mayoral candidate, and a newly added Dupont Circle branch on his DMV site, whose home page has a picture of shirtless, partying men and offers video rental, personal training, massage, and Martini services. Other amenities include “Gay licensing”—special permits that contain information such as “AIDS/HIV status,” “type of car driven,” “favorite Madonna and Brittney Spears albums,” and “gym membership login.”

Janis Hazel, spokesperson for the agency said, via e-mail, that “the DC DMV won’t…dignify this website with a comment. We have more pressing issues before us which all pertain to providing residents and visitors to the District of Columbia with accurate and timely customer service in all DMV transactions which reflects our continuing commitment to ensuring the safe operation of motor vehicles and public safety.”

Despite the department’s refusal to acknowledge the site and its contents, McKenna suspects that someone at the DMV has been reading over his work. “Looking at my statistics, there are a large number of visitors from something something something at dc dot gov,” he says.

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