The Florida DMV

Doing Battle with Bureacrats

I landed in Florida this past Thursday. I had two major anxieties leading up to this move. One was taking my dog on the plane. I was paranoid that the airline might give me some grief, like the carrier wasn't big enough or something, and I was concerned that she might not behave well during the trip. She had never been confined to a carrier before, and there was every chance that she would start whining or barking and yelping endlessly, and heaven forbid she peed or pooped in the carrier while we were all stuck in that enclosed cabin. But in the end it worked out just fine. She whined just a little bit now and then, but once I was buckled into that seat for a while and we were up in the air she realized no one was going anywhere and she mostly just fell asleep.

My other anxiety was much bigger, and potentially much more impactful. The mobile home that I bought down here actually came with a car. The seller was leaving it behind, so it was mine whether I wanted it or not. He signed the title over to me back in December when I made the purchase, and filled out a bill of sale as well, so I knew that the paperwork was all in order. But what concerned me was that the Florida bureaucracy might reject the whole thing for some trivial reason. I have a lot of experience with DMVs, being a car collector and all. I know that the slightest thing can bring everything to a grinding halt, and over time I've learned very well how to navigate the NYS system. But this was Florida. It was an unknown. Based on Florida's reputation I figured that either they wouldn't give a shit, or they would make my life a living hell. There was no way to know which way it would go, but I knew that any one of a number of things could potentially go wrong.

First on my list of worries was that I had a NY driver's license and was applying for a Florida registration on a car that started its life in Quebec Canada. The seller had already switched the title and registration over to Florida, so that was in my favor, but it was a complicated matter from the get-go. I like my DMV experiences to be simple and straight-forward, not complicated. Everyone was reassuring me that because Florida is a vacation state that this kind of thing happens all the time. I was sure they were right, but it was worrisome.

The other complication was how the seller signed the title over to me. It clearly stated that the seller was to fill in the buyer information. I knew why. They don't want someone to just blindly sign their part of the title, and months later let whoever wound up buying it fill in the rest. A title transfer is supposed to be a direct transaction between a seller and buyer on a specific date. Having the seller fill out the buyer information helps to ensure that it happens that way.

As the seller was filling out the title I kept telling him that he had to enter my information himself, but he spoke French and his English was not good at all. I could not get the message across. When I would verbally tell him my information and point to where he had to write it, he kept handing me the pen and saying, "You do. You do." I finally gave up and just wrote my information myself, but I regretted it right away, and worried about it the whole time I had been sitting at home. I also misread where it said "dealer license number" and thought it said "driver license number." Before I noticed my error I instructed him to write his Quebec driver's license number in that field. I realized what I had done right away, but it was too late. Having something in that field could be a big problem, not only because it was not a dealership transaction, but that what he entered was not a valid Florida dealer license number. It was another to worry about.

The odds were good that both of these matters would probably be overlooked or even go unnoticed by the processer, but if it went wrong it would go very, very wrong. If the processer was having a bad day and wanted to be a bitch about it, they would be within their rights to call me out on either matter. That wouldn't just halt the process, it would invalidated the title. That would mean that the seller back up in Montreal would have to order a duplicate title, fill it out again, and send it to me. I knew that the chances of that happening were significantly less than zero, and even in the unlikely event that he did follow through, it would take weeks or months to complete. It would effectively be game-over for the whole affair, and I would be stuck down in Florida without transportation.

The only other thing worrying me was simply the DMV form itself. I've done this a million times in NY. I know the form. I know how to fill it out. I know where the pitfalls are. I filled the Florida form out the night before I was going to the DMV. What I had was something the RV park office found online and printed out for me. I had no way of knowing if it was the correct official form, or if I was filling it out correctly. When it asked for "residence" I didn't know if I should put my new Florida address or my permanent residence back home. Was it okay that I was skipping the boxes I wasn't filling in? These issues wouldn't be a show-stopper like problems with the title, because I could just fill out another form and correct whatever was wrong, but it could send me to the back of the line and waste huge amounts of time.

My first priority on my first full day in town was to get this taken care of so I could get around. I had scoped out the DMV office on my previous trip back when I made the purchase, so I knew where it was and the general layout. It was actually located in a shopping mall of all places. On this day I had to take an Uber over there. I made the assumption that the office opened at 9AM. I had the Uber pick me up at 8:30. Being Fort Lauderdale it took a long time to drive the short distance there, but I arrived around 8:45.

When I got to the mall entrance closest to the DMV office I saw that there was already a line. It was a long 15 minutes of waiting. When they unlocked the doors, everyone made a mad dash to the DMV office as people tried to get in front of each other as they walked as fast as they could. The office had a sign-in kiosk that established the order in which people would be processed, and it asked whether you were doing a title or just renewing plates. The line for titles was a lot shorter than plate renewals, so I was actually ahead of some people who signed in before me. I sat down and patiently waited, but it was only about 5-10 minutes before I was up.

I stepped to the window and started the transaction. The woman serving me was utterly emotionless as she received and reviewed my documentation. I would have preferred warm and friendly, but this was better than perturbed and hostile. She went over the documents looking back and forth and back and forth. I was actually conducting 2 transactions because I was also titling the mobile home unit that I purchased. I was willing to do that another time, but she gruffly said that I needed to do them together. Things appeared to be progressing well. I know how to read the body language in these circumstances. If they are typing into the computer, then things are going well. It's when they furrow their brow and start looking at the papers more closely that you need to worry. That wasn't happening. She was looking and typing and looking and typing. It was a very good sign.

She did inquire about my address, and I said that what I put on the form was where I was residing here in Florida. I could barely hear what she was saying so I had to put my ear right up to the metal vent thing in the plexiglass. She asked me the unit number as she actually looked the RV park up in the system. I sweated a little bit as she kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, afraid that my park wasn't in the system, but finally she found it.

The first little curveball came when she asked me, "Do you want the title now or an amount?" I didn't understand what she meant. An amount? That made no sense. I had to have her repeat it twice and then explain it to me. I finally realized she wasn't saying, "an amount" she was saying "in the mail." She wasn't really annunciating, and didn't pronounce the "l" on the end of "mail." I learned in a random conversation the night before that you could pay extra for an expedited title. I told her she could mail it to me that was fine.

The next curveball was one that I was totally not expecting. With all of the little details I had been worrying about, this one never landed on my radar. As I mentioned, the car started its life in Montreal Quebec Canada. The declaration of the odometer reading on the title was in kilometers. When I was filling out the paperwork the night before, I put the current odometer reading in miles, which was what showed on the car's dashboard. At first she called me out because the figure I declared was way smaller than what was on the title, which is a huge red flag. I pointed out that the title was in kilometers. She looked back at it, saw that I was right, but then said, "They have to match." Now was when I started to panic. I asked if that meant that I had to go off and fill it out again. She said, "I didn't say to go anywhere," half admonishing and half reassuring. I whipped out my phone, and standing right there at the window said into it, "Hey Siri seventy-three thousand eight hundred and one miles is how many kilometers?" It gave me the answer and it was larger enough than what was on the title to be plausible. She had me enter it in the "affidavit" section.

She want back to entering stuff into the computer, which confirmed that I had dodged that bullet. After a lot more data entry I saw her pull a license plate off the stack. I knew that was the sign that I was good to go. They don't assign you a license plate until you've passed all the myriad validations and are approved in the system. I finally started to breathe a sigh of relief, and my anxiety turned to excitement. She cautioned me that I would have to pay sales tax. I said I was aware of that, and knew that it would be considerably higher for the mobile home transaction. She kept finishing up the data entry and getting everything together. She printed out the registration document with the little square sticker attached, and bundled it with license plate using a rubber band. She repeated the process for the mobile home registration. I knew we were approaching the end. None of my worries had come to pass. This was going to happen.

When she had it all together she wrote the amount due on a sticky note and showed it to me through the glass. It was in the mid-low 4-figures, which was about what I was expecting. This office only took cash or check, no credit cards. I didn't know this up front, but had made sure to bring my checkbook just in case. I also had to pay a 2% surcharge for paying by check, but it was my only option. I mean I wasn't going to bring thousands of dollars in cash with me to the DMV. That would be absurd. I had 2 checks left in my checkbook. That gave me one backup if I bungled it the first time. But I really took my time and very carefully and legibly wrote out the check and dropped it in the slot.

She read it over and didn't see any mistakes. She had a little machine on her desk and she started pushing buttons on it. While she did this I brought up the banking app on my phone and confirmed I had more than enough to cover the amount, even though I knew I did. She slid the check through the little scanner around the base of the machine. I had seen this before. I knew it was reading the account and routing numbers in the funky OCR font on the bottom strip of the check. I watched closely, and I did not like her body language. Then came that moment I had been fearing all this time. She started furrowing her brow. She looked at the little display, punched info in again, and scanned it again. Her brow was still furrowed. My heart sank. My anxiety rose. A sense of dread filled me. Eventually she turned back to me and said that the system wasn't accepting the check. After all this, after avoiding all the landmines, dodging all the bullets and overcoming all the hurdles, after she assigned the plates and printed the registrations, as she was just about to hand it all over to me, this the absolute final step had failed.

I pleaded with her like a condemned man begging for his life. I asked her to try it again. She said she already tried it 3 times. I wanted to show her my bank app that displayed the available balance, but I knew that she couldn't move forward if the system was rejecting it. I asked if she could hold the registrations and plates for me while I ran to the bank, but she said not unless I returned "in a timely manner." There was an ATM in the mall nearby, but I knew it would not disburse anywhere near this amount. I said it would involve a trip to the bank, and she said she'd have to void it all out and I'd have to start over. Void it out. Those were the three worst words I could hear in that moment. She seemed annoyed at this extra work, as if it was my fault the check didn't validate.

I walked off dejected. At first I was thinking I would have to bail and come back another day. This being Friday it meant that I would not have the car for the weekend when I had a long list of errands to run and things go buy. I didn't even have any groceries in the house. But then common sense prevailed and I realized that I could just take an Uber to the nearest Bank of America branch, get the cash, and then Uber back again. The biggest impact would be that I would be at the end of a huge line by the time I got back to the DMV. But it was still early in the day. I could still get it completed, maybe even before lunch.

I checked my phone and there was a branch not too far away. I called up an Uber. He got there pretty quick, and it didn't take too long to get to the bank. There was a line, but nothing like the DMV. It was a bit of a wait, but in the larger scheme of things it the blink of an eye. I got up to the window and quickly and easily made the withdrawal. She asked me what kind of bills I wanted. "The biggest ones you've got," I said. She put a stack of hundreds though the bill counter, showed me the total, and handed them to me in a little envelope. I put it in my front pocket so that it wouldn't fall out and no one could snatch it. Another quick Uber ride and I was right back at the shopping mall.

When I walked back into the DMV office I was relieved to see there was no line at the check-in kiosk. That was a good sign. And because I was doing a title transaction I was in the shorter queue again. It said a 34 minute wait. Not too bad all things considered. I sat patiently waiting. My chair was directly across from the clerk who processed me earlier. I was half hoping when she saw me she'd wave me up and let me jump the line, but no such luck. These people are bureaucrats after all. They follow procedures to the letter, period.

The guy next to me chatted me up a bit while I waited. He chided me for declaring the actual full purchase price instead of lying and saving tons of money in sales tax. I watched the monitor that displayed where people were in line. I was number 2 in the title queue. It said the guy in front of me would be up in 1 minute. It said that for like 20 minutes. Each time I saw a person leave a window I looked back up to the monitor, but my queue was not moving. I was feeling surprisingly patient. I was uncharacteristically content to wait.

Finally after what seemed like forever, the guy who had been in front of me in the queue was called. I figured now it would only be another 10-15 minutes for me, but to my surprise I was called like immediately afterwards. And as luck would have it, I was right back at the same window with the same clerk. "I'm back," I said. "And I brought cash."

She buzzed through everything quickly, having already done it earlier. She did all the data entry at light speed. She had to ask for my insurance card again, and I had to sign a couple papers again, but that was it. When she had the registrations printed out and bundled with the license plates again, she again wrote the amount on a sticky note and showed me through the window. It was indeed 2% less than the amount she had given me before. I actually withdrew the full amount at the bank just in case. I was able to pocket one of the $100 bills and pull a couple other bills out of my wallet to get as close as I could to exact change. I counted out all the money in stacks of $1000 and laid them out as such in the slot. She broke each stack down to $500 clusters, fanned them out like playing cards, and ran the anti-counterfeit marker across them. She got through it all and confirmed that I had counted it out correctly. She opened the cash drawer and gave me back $0.50 in change. She handed me the plates. I had won. I vanquished the bureaucratic dragon. I was the victor.

As I left the DMV office and headed for the mall exit with a big smile on my face, I saw through the doors that the sun was out. The mall sound system was playing the R.E.M. song "Shiny happy people." How apropos. I was a happy person headed out to the shiny sunlight. I called up another Uber. It only took a couple minutes to arrive, but I was so anxious to get back home that it felt like an eternity. The driver wound up being chatty so I told him the whole story. He loved it. Within minutes I was back at my new mobile home and the first damn thing I did was put that plate on the car.

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