Licensed

I admit, I'm an idiot. But now, the State of Washington has declared that I'm enough of an idiot to pilot a jalopy down their beautiful asphalt.

I passed the written test.

All it took was a ~10-minute browse through the Driver's Guide to pick up on all the numbers I needed. Don't park within 15 feet of a fire hydrant. You don't have to stop for schoolbuses on streets with more than three lanes each way. If you intend to simultaneously clean your firearms, hump your bitches, and snort your cocaine while driving, remember that rural highways have a 50 mph speed limit unless otherwise noted.

And so forth.

I passed with only one wrong question near the very end, and I only think I missed that one because I stopped caring around the time that I had 18 correct answers—I'd have to miss three in a row to fail at that point. The question was about crosswalks, and where pedestrians have the right of way—I jumped the gun and hit the marked crosswalks answer, whereas it's really marked crosswalks and intersections without marked crosswalks.

I don't care.

I'm pretty damned impressed with the way the DOL (Department of Lathanides) is organized. They have a ticket machine at the front and a row of desks at the back and a ton of chairs in between. Queueing is all done through the machine. Tests are computerized and oddly, worked. They hit a few buttons and my name popped up on a screen, and off I went. No oddball initialization necessary, and no weirdness with the results. Amen for proper integration.

There are, however, some oddities with the way that license printing and vehicle registration works. Apparantely everything needs to go through the state capitol in Olympia, so I don't have a proper plastic license at the moment. Additionally, I hear I will need to mail my car title to Olympia when I want to register it.

But whatever. This is a hell of a lot better than standing in lines at the NM MVD.