DMV

What a waste of a day.

Woke up late and tired, probably because I was in Boston until late last night. Well worth it, catching up with an old friend, but still. We met up because he’s attending the “SD (Software Development) Best Practices” conference. Apparently the sessions are good, but from what I saw of the show floor, this field is dominated by BS and marketing. I was a little bit shocked that the state of the art in supporting software development appears to be:

* CVS or SVN, on steroids, for document control.
* Automated GUI testing (through VNC or something similar)
* High powered versions of grep, which will find open source licenses and make sure they comply with your corporate policy on such things
* Other crap that I couldn’t understand what it was.

Now, keep in mind, I’ve got a recent graduate degree from a pretty good school, in the field in question. I’m also some kind of high powered consultant in IT. If there’s value to this crap, I should probably be aware of it. My BS filter was going off frantically at these marketing speak posters claiming “Reduce your development cycle while optimizing ROI through Best Practices innovations in Business driven software design!” I’m all like, what? It translates as something like “Your business makes more money if you write the software you actually need, on the first try.”

Spent the morning trying to get a leash on our support ticket queue, which has been uncomfortably backed up for about a week now. Went to noon karate and got started on the “bo” staff. Woot, says I. Staff is cool.

Then came the soul-killing part. I went to the DMV to pick up redmed‘s custom plates. Went in, stood in line (took my book with me), got the form, and was stopped cold when the lady said ‘now you’ll need to have redmed sign this and get it notarized. If you come back today or tomorrow, you can come to the front of the line NEXT!.” I was all like “say what?”

So I hustled over to the hostpital (location of both redmed and a notary), got the document signed, and hauled ten kinds of ass back to the DMV, only to arrive at about 3:17pm. They close their doors to new admissions at 3:15. I gave the cop at the door my winningest smile and said, “the lady gave me this paper, and said I could come back in today.” He said “closed.” I used my Jedi powers on him, and said “so there’s nothing you can do,” and let it trail off, but didn’t do the ‘I’m leaving’ body language. Most people are totally unwilling to be the bad guy. After about 25 seconds of eye contact, he said “allright, go in.” I have no shame. If I had cleavage, I’d use it.

Anyway, I showed the nice lady my notarized form, and she hands me number “B04”. I look at the board and it says “50”. At that point I realize that I’ve left my book in the car.

The DMV spent the next 45 minutes sucking and gnawing at my soul, but I left with the plates.

Went to Whole Foods, got some groceries, and that was my day.