The Registry of Motor Vehicles has figured out a way: stop all those damn mailings. Beginning immediately, the RMV will cease mailing the helpful renewal letters for Driver’s Licenses and vehicle inspection that we’ve all become accustomed to. Not to mention reducing business hours at many branches...

Will also stop notifying you when your license is up for renewal.

Pablo makes the case that the Registry should drop everything and replace all our inanely-mottoed plates (and all those old green-on-white plates still hanging around):

... So, here we are in a state of 6.4 million people, and we have exhausted more than 37 million possible plate combinations (including the 900,000 number-only plates from 100000 to 999999). ...

What? There's no way to apply NAT to license plates? (The preceding bad joke brought to you by the Society of People Who Know Just Enough About DNS to Be Stupid.)

That would be the Roslindale RMV on a hot July day.

OK, granted, it's no longer in the basement of the old municipal building, but now it's in this tiny little room up a ramp in the old municipal building, with far too few seats for the number of people crammed into it. And, yesterday, it managed a neat trick: Although the air conditioning was on, you still managed to overheat because a) all the people there and b) no circulation whatsoever. Combine that with all the elephants stomping around upstairs at the community center (well, what sounded like elephants stomping around upstairs) and it was enough to induce nausea.

Now add in extra-friendly RMV workers. We were there to renew Nancy's registration. She has an ankle issue right now, it hurts her to stand for long, so when we got there, she took the only available seat - in front of some PC used for testing or something. She must've been sitting there for 20 minutes before an employee saw her and simply barked, "YOU CAN'T SIT THERE!" Now, in those 20 minutes, not a single person had needed to take an exam there (or do whatever it is one does there). We explained why she was sitting there. Drone replied: "THERE ARE SEATS AROUND THERE! YOU CAN'T SIT THERE!"

Fortunately, there was, indeed, a single seat this time around. But apparently "excuse me" is not in that RMV worker's vocabulary. I wonder if she's the same worker who tried convincing some guy he was dead on one of my earlier visits there.

Kendrick Perkins at the RMV:

... All I could think of is how miserable he looked. I mean the guy just won the NBA championship and were does he end up the following Monday? At the RMV renewing his license. What a total bummer. What ever happened to that "I'm going to Disneyworld" thing. I've never seen a commercial that showed a sports star saying "I'm going to the RMV to renew my license." ...

TJIC tears apart the RMV Web site:

... There are something like 40 links off the page.

Which one do I want, to renew my registration?

I read over 20 or so of them before I get to "renew your registration".

I can imagine that there is a better way to organize this - how about doing a bit of datamining, finding the top 4 links that get clicked, and calling those out up top?

(And, does "BLOG ARCHIVE" need to be in capital letters? Also, do many folks find the need to go and read the archives of the blog of the Registry of Motor Vehicles!?!?!?) ...

Wait. The RMV has a blog? Gotta go check it out ...

OK, I'm back. It's kinda awful, sort of like what you'd imagine a blog in Dilbert: PHB reads about blogs in some magazine, orders Wally to create one, and he goes out and every couple of months he posts a regurgitated press release and then just stops and nobody notices.

Andy descended into hell today, otherwise known as the Roslindale branch of the Registry of Motor Vehicles:

... There were at least 100 people waiting. My number in line was just short of "never gonna happen today buster!" Nonetheless I had to get this straightened up so I wait. And waited. Then I waited a bit more. Let me further paint the picture. 100 of my not closest friends on a 70 plus degree day with no air conditioning, little or no breeze, and even less patience. ...

Wants to hire armed guards for all branches, following incident involving guy without proof of residency threatening to shoot up the Beverly registry because workers wouldn't give him a state ID. Unlike at the turnpike authority, there are no plans to provide weapons to rank-and-file employees, Registrar Anne L. Collins said.

Around Natick considers the possibility of the Registry moving into the old National Guard land on Speen Street near Rte. 135.

Channel 4 has the story.