The Government is a Pain

I got a letter from the Wisconsin DMV yesterday.  Apparently sending money in was not enough to get my license plate renewed.  I also needed to get my emission checked.

Requiring every car to get its emission checked is silly and costly.  If the government wants to get heavily polluting cars off the road then it can have the police give cars with lots of exhaust tickets. 

So I drove the hour out of my way to the usual emission testing place, and discovered that it was closed.  I thought that that was good news because I then had no idea where to get tested. 

Luckily I stopped and bought some apples at Walmart, and upon my exit of the Walmart parking lot I discovered the DMV across the street.  Not the place they do testing, of course.  So I went in and asked where I needed to go to get tested.  The woman behind the counter mumbled something and gave me a slip of paper with places I could go to.  I knew where one was and got tested.

Now I still need to mail in the stupid paperwork, I didn't want to return to the DMV because I had crossed the city several times already, and didn't want to do it again.

Did I mention that the road which would have been fastest was under construction?  Which meant that I needed to cross the city, with all of the traffic and stop lights in order to deal with this.

The return wasn't all bad, however.  I learned that that city was exactly one Shakira album plus two Savoy Brown songs away from home.