Bureaucracitus and Other Afflictions

As shaken as C. and I have been during our first few weeks of residing in Providence, we can certainly say this: it is no Tucson. Admittedly, we remain somewhat nonplussed and beleaguered, our latest misadventure being my presently unsuccessful mission to render my car legal for the streets of Rhode Island. A daunting prospect it has proven; Rhode Island has not only one of the most gratuitously byzantine motor vehicle registries ^1, but also some of the most stringent and exacting vehicle safety standards in the nation. Submitted to inspection were my windshield wiper blades, wheel alignment (more on these two in a moment), brake master cylinder, engine light, and many more items that could conceivably endanger both other motorists and me. My car, mind you, while indeed somewhat long in the grille, has only 79,000 miles on it and has been regularly maintained -- and I failed the inspection! The nature and extent of my car's perilous disrepair? A breached CV boot, worn wiper blades, and window tinting (my car spent its early years in Arizona).

This news, coming some five hours after having brought the car to the state-certified repair shop, was quite a shock, because I had just come from a state where a safety inspection consists of a DMV functionary looking to see if one's headlamps, directional, parking and reverse lights work. I authorized a the CV boot repair, which added $250.00 to the $37.00 inspection tally and another two hours of loitering in a tire showroom watching what seemed like eighty turns of the CNN news carousel on a 70s-vintage faux-credenza widescreen TV that had serious tint problems in the form of a dramatic shift to the red which made the talking heads of CNN look like burn victims.

Later I came home and began, in a thunderstorm that came suddenly, the exasperating task of peeling tinted laminate from all four windows and the rear windshield of my car.

This experience, one in a litany of other patience-trying experiences here in P-town has somehow managed to radicalize C. into some sort of Republican with a Libertarian bent, because she believes that such hassles result from the putatively progressive policies of blue-state mandarins, which result only in bloated bureaucracy, graft, till-skimming, and cronyism. I suggested to her various points west, namely, Rapid City, South Dakota or Northern Idaho, as places she should look to eventually settling.

More follies and pitfalls await, I'm sure.




1. If you think my words here an exaggeration, know that I at one point actually had to scribble down on the back of a photocopied form an impromptu sworn statement averring that my stepmother and father were indeed my stepmother and father, my stepmother and father's signing the title over to me and "selling" the car to me for one dollar being deemed insufficient evidence of both my parentage and my rightful possession of the auto in question, as was the fact that I bear my father's name -- first, middle and last.