A taste of home

Last night I bit the bullet and started working on some administrative stuff I knew was going to have to happen before I get home. I called the Montgomery County probate judge office in order to renew my Alabama license plates.

The story behind this: I got new tags for my car in either late September or early October (I can’t remember which). They’re Alabama plates, since I live in Alabama, but I’m not a resident of the state, because I’m military. Anyway, they’re used to this when you live near a base; it’s usually a little bit of extra explanation but they eventually work with you. However, when I got the tags, I noticed that the expiration stickers they gave me were set to expire in February. What gives? (Apparently they like to give you tags for your birth month, but since I’m a November birthday—oh yes, a Scorpio—they didn’t want to give me stickers that were only good for 1 month, and of course it would be unthinkable to give you tags that wouldn’t expire for more than a year!)

Anyway, I was irked about this, but figured that I’d just wait for the renewal paperwork to be forwarded to me; I’d already determined that they have an automatic online renewal for your stickers. However, the paperwork never showed up, and here it is late February!

So I took the bull by the horns and called their listed number last night. (We have to do this stuff in late afternoon or evening, even night, because we’re 8-11 hours ahead of the States out here.) When I explained that I needed to renew my plates but never received the paperwork, the bored woman on the other end of the phone told me that, then, I was going to have to come to the office in person. “Well,” I said, “That’s not really an option for me because, you see, I’m deployed out here in Iraq.” Which got her attention!

Then she told me I’d have to send her my proof of insurance. She gave me her email address (which she actually gave to me incorrectly; thankfully I was still on their site and knew the correct organization info to put on the right side of the @ sign), and I went to my insurance’s website, got a pdf of my current insurance card, and emailed it on to her. After waiting for a response for a half hour or so, I got back on the phone.

She hadn’t bothered to check her email in that time; so while I held she looked it up. Then she argued with me for fifteen minutes about whether I was allowed to have Alabama plates. Something about the whole idea that I live in Alabama and am formally stationed at the base there, but I’m deployed (essentially a six-month long business trip) to Iraq, as well as being formally a resident of Washington State, was too much for her to handle. She told me, after all this, that she had to check in with the base, and asked me to call her back in an hour.

I protested momentarily (it was 10 p.m. for me at this point), but she totally didn’t get that it was this late out here, so I eventually gave up with a sigh. “Fine, I’ll call you back in an hour.”

After frittering away the hour, because I was honestly too tired to think (I’m coming in around 7:15 a.m. these days), I called her back. “Yeah,” she said, “I wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone there.” Then things started to progress; after I had—slowly—repeated my credit card information to her so that I could pay for these, she asked what address I wanted to send them to. That started another round of confusion; she didn’t understand why I wanted to send them to Arizona if I was here (well, it’s because the car is in Arizona with my parents…), and when I’d gotten partway through—slowly—telling her the address to send the tags to, she suddenly interrupted me, and asked me to go on hold.

After five minutes, she came back on the phone, and put the kibosh on everything, saying that she needed to see my orders; to know for sure that I was stationed in Alabama, before I could go ahead with all this.

At this point (remember, it was 11 p.m.), I told her gently that I would have to get my orders to her tomorrow, which would be overnight for her, since I didn’t have them with me at the moment. I don’t think she understood, but anyway, that ended the phone call. She told me oh-so-helpfully that she’d be in there tomorrow at the same time; I could call then, and that I shouldn’t worry—I had until the end of the month to get this done!

Ahhh, the joys of service, Montgomery-style. This has been a bit of a joke among my friends and I who were moved down here from Ohio last spring. The Montgomery timetable is a lot more flexible, and things progress at a slower speed, than an outsider would expect.

Rather than making me mad, the way that this usually would at home, it has been a source of delighted amusement to me. Nothing brings the feeling of home to me more than dealing with recalcitrant Alabama state employees… It reminds me that there is, actually, a whole world out there outside the blast walls around the International Zone, and I’ll be encountering that world again in a few months.

Update as of 9:35 p.m.: Well, it looks like it may have happened the way it needed to. I sent my orders over (though I was stupid—or perhaps overtired—enough to forget to attach them to my first email) to the woman I talked with last night, and she received the email with the orders, which she said were fine, the address (in Arizona, even!) to send my stickers to, and the credit card information so that I could pay for my renewal. Of course I went on hold 6 times during the course of the conversation, and she couldn’t tell me how much it was going to cost me; she said I could call her back (in an hour?) to check on that—I asked her to send me an email instead.

But it would appear (though I don’t want to be too optimistic) that I will have unexpired plates on my car, come this spring when I return to my parents’ house to get it! Hooray! It’s funny what a small triumph like that can do for you…