If you hurry down to your nearest RMV office:

As Paul Keleher discovered.

Posted under this Creative Commons license in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

Bobby Constantino accompanied a young guy to the Registry for his written exam today:

The Globe plays Snopes and reports the Registry is NOT calling them back in.

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

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.

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.

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.

Channel 4 has the story.

Four times now, Josh Ourisman has tried to swap his California license for a Massachusetts license. Four times now, the Registry of Motor Vehicles has found a way to screw it up. Yesterday, for the second time in a row, he was nearing the front of the line at the Chinatown RMV when their computer system went down: