It HAD to be Z

I miss the DMV. There. I said it. I’ll say it again. I miss the freaking DMV. The Department of Motor Vehicles. I miss it.

About a month ago to the day I started the process to get a driver’s license in Ecuador. I realized then that anything involving beurocracy is harder in South America, but my gawddd was it difficult. I used to think that the DMV was the standard in incompetence but over the past month, I longed for the cigarette stained, stale potato chipped odor of a DMV. The place where the only things you need to pass a driver’s test are 21 points of identification, the ability to not crash a car for 9 minutes, and the ability to answer questions that matched the difficulty of “What’s your favorite color.” *Disclaimer: while it would be easy to actually look up how many points of identification you need, I’m not going to do it, so if I’m wrong…I’m wrong.

I started the process of license getting with a little bit of research and some conversations with other teachers at our school who had beat me to the punch. They outlined a step by step process to get them and said aside from the unnecessary steps, it was relatively easy. They were wrong.

The first step is to have a valid license in the United States. Check. The next step is to contact the DMV of your state and obtain a certified letter stating that you do not have any warrants, driving revocations, suspensions, or other nonsense that would make you a hazard to the world’s roads. This seems like a long process, but was actually the easiest part. I called the county tax collector for Orange County and had a PDF in my email within 13 minutes. The only catch was, I had 30 days of that letter being valid.

The next step was to take the letter, translate it, and get it notarized. With the help of my limited Spanish skills and Google Translate, I was able to get the letter all squared away and translated. Realizing that most notaries are only open during the Monday-Friday 9-5 window, I decided to wait until our Christmas break started, so I took it to the notary our school recommended.

We set out with the goal of using the Monday off of work as a day to get a bunch of the steps out of the way. When we got there at 9am and we were told that the letters looked good but at the bottom, we needed to say that we were the ones to translate it and to the best of our knowledge everything in the letter was correct. I went to hand write it and was told that would not suffice. We left and somehow found an internet café, because that’s still a thing here. We typed up our letters again from scratch and added the part about the translation and walked back into the notary. We put our papers back on the counter and the woman told us that it would not suffice. It had to literally be written in the exact words she was saying, not in a gist sort of way. We asked her, “If I do this again, with the exact words, will it work and be good enough to notarize?” to which she replied yes. We went back to the internet café, re-typed the letter for a third time, added HER words, paid the man and came back. When we got back to the notary, she looked at the papers and looked at us. She then asked “Do you speak perfect Spanish?” We told her no, but we used a translator to help us with the letter and she said, “Well if YOU don’t speak PERFECT Spanish, then someone helped you. I can’t certify this unless they sign it.” This is about the point where I was ready to lose my stuff. I looked at her, explained that it was us, and that we did not have any help, that we did everything she said to do and that SHE said it would be good 10 minutes earlier, and she just repeated herself. Meanwhile, all of these conversations were happening in Spanish! I asked her if there were any errors with the translation she said there were not, which is why someone had to have helped me. When we refused to leave until it was notarized she sat down in her chair and we in ours and we stared at her. We did not blink or yield. Our goal was to make her as uncomfortable as possible until she addressed us. When she called us back up after a few minutes of pretending to do work, she told us that she couldn’t even notarize it if she wanted to. The notary would be in at 3:00pm and THEY would decide if our paperwork was acceptable. In the meantime, if we wanted to go to a notary across the street and see if they could help, we were welcome to.

We left after some unkind mumbling and went to the other notary, explained what we needed and what we had and she asked for $12 in a very matter of fact way. Finally! We were going to get to do all of this stuff after all. When I paid her, she put my paper in a pile of about 900 other papers and said it would be ready in three days…on Christmas Eve. I rolled my eyes and we walked out of the notary feeling defeated.

The next step was to get a blood type card. We had to go to a Red Cross and get our blood tested so our blood type could be included on our eventual license. Simply knowing your blood type or having a Red Cross card from the U.S. was simply not good enough. I think it’s the same thing as the Coriolis Effect. The same thing that makes the toilet flush the opposite direction below the equator is the same thing that changes your blood type when you go below the equator.?. We wandered around the street it was supposed to be on for about an hour and couldn’t find it and eventually went on with our days.

The next day, while walking to lunch we accidentally found the Red Cross and went in. We filled out some paperwork and a lovely elderly woman took a swab of alcohol and wiped it on our thumbs and then took what I can only believe was a safety pin from her dress or a tac from a bulletin board and stuck it in our thumb and proceeded to dig before pulling out the needle-like thing. We rubbed our thumbs on a slide and she had our cards printed out within about two minutes. There were about 19 health code violations that I noticed in the facility but who was I to argue. We got our cards and were on our way.

The next step was filling out an application and picking up the notarized papers, which went without a hitch and aren’t worth my words or your time reading .

After all of that was done, we had to get a psiosensometrico test. This is basically a glorified carnival game and is designed to test your agility and reflexes. We got to the place this morning about ten minutes after they opened. I was 2 days from my 30 day letter expiring and needed to take the day off of work to get it taken care of. When we walked in, we waited for 20 minutes to be seen by one of the four attendants, even though there were only two customers. When we got seen after waiting, we had to wait another 40 minutes or so for the lady to figure out how to print a receipt for us. When we got that squared away, we each went into a back room to begin the fun.

The first test is a sight test where you read the letters at different sizes and all of that. I was killing it until I got to the Z. I know all of my letters in Spanish but Z. It had to be Z. And boy was it Z. Out of 25 or so letters, 9 of them were Z. I nailed all of the other ones and then just gave up and kept saying Z.  After the letters were some color identifiers that I did well on. Somehow, I passed.

The next game was a spinning disk. Think of it as a Pac Man shaped metal disk. It spun around a metal track that had three holes in it the size of a dime. I was given an electric pen and the disc began to spin. Without understanding much of the instructions I started to use my pen to poke the holes as the disk made them available. The lack of protest or correction either meant that the attendant was amused and wanted me to keep doing it, or I was doing it right. It was basically a moving version of the board game “Operation.” I did well on that and moved to the next thing.

The next step was a bit tougher. There was a metal track in the shape of an S on a table. The track was about a half inch thick. I was given a device that was anchored to the table and looked like hedge clippers. On the hinge of the hedge clippers was a needle that touched the metal track. The goal, by lifting the hedge clippers (but not too high), squeezing them to open or close them, and moving them forward, back, left, or right, was to move the needle along the trail without it running off of the one half inch “road.” This was kind of tough and on top of it, there was a 70 second time limit. After going too slow and cautiously for the first half I had to speed it up but eventually passed.

The next step was a set of peddles on the floor. A green light would show up on a screen and I would have to “drive” and when the light turned red it measured my reaction time.

After all of these tests and a lot of stress, I got a little certificate saying due to my ability to poke a metal pen through a moving Pac Man, I was clearly a capable driver.

The last step was the test. I had to take my Florida driver’s license, passport, visa, passport photos, application, obstacle course paper, letter from the Florida DMV, translated letter, notarization certificate, blood card, and about $65 to the Florida version of a DMV and pass a test written in a foreign language. No problem.

The previous three nights, Shannon and I studied, drilled, studied some more and crammed with all of the practice materials we could get. We were using a combination of comprehension, process of elimination, pneumonic devices, strategy, and uncanny skills at inny minney miny mo to pass practice test after practice test. Judgment day had arrived.

When we got to the Ecuadorian Transit Authority building (hereby known as EDMV) we were ushered into a line of about 30 people by a man with a bullet proof vest and a shotgun. I thought I had wandered into a Die Hard-esque hostile takeover but that’s just how they roll at the EDMV. After waiting in that line for about a half hour we were told to go wait in another line for a half hour. After that we were told they couldn’t help us unless we got approval from the license czar. We asked four people and were eventually introduced to the license czar who walked us to another line to wait in. We waited there until it was time to wait in another line and pay $65. Then it was time to wait in another line to take the test in a foreign language.

The test was computer-based and consisted of 20 questions. It took 16 correct responses to pass. Again, foreign language…There were a mixture of questions about traffic patterns, speed limits, tunnel etiquette, and sign identification. It was freaking hard. After it was all said and done, I got a 17 and was somehow able to get an Ecuadorian Driver’s License.

The steps and hassles were just another example in the shining light of efficiency and convenience that Ecuadorian bureaucracy is. I miss you DMV, where one crappy task can actually be accomplished in a day.

P.S: Sorry for the delay in posting. It's been a crazy two weeks. A lot has happened, and as we have time, we will post a lot of lengthy stuff to catch you up on. If you're reading this because you know us and you are family or friends, make sure you check back later this week. You'll want to read it...trust me.