Waiting in Line at the DMV

The good thing about getting up ridiculously early on a Saturday to wait in line outside the DMV is the multitude of interesting people to watch, listen to, and converse with.

Saturday morning, I got up and went to the DMV to get the title for the new Vespa transferred to me. There's a trick to going to the DMV on a Saturday morning - you've got to get there early enough that the line outside isn't very long if you want to actually save yourself some time. By the time the DMV opened, the line was a couple hundred people deep. So sure, I waited about an hour before the office opened, but I was out of there in 10 minutes and had the rest of my day free for whatever.

While waiting, I got to listen in on the conversation of the people in front of me. This dude was a biker, and wanted to be sure everybody knew it. I was waiting for him to explain to someone how one time he had to "lay the bike down" when he told an even better story.

Apparently at his office, there's a number of motorcyclists and they segregate themselves by bike style - Harleys, metric cruisers, and sport bikes. As I tried to wrap my head around that dumbness (does that happen at anyone else's office? At mine, everyone parks where ever there's a spot), he started talking about how one day there was a scooter in "his" spot. And he took the time to complain to the parking guard about the cruddy scooter in "his" spot among the Harley's.

Well, guess who the scooter belonged to. If you guessed it was the guard, you just won yourself an imaginary donut.

Biker-man continued, talking about how there's no way he'd ride a scooter because they aren't safe, what with their little wheels, lack of power, and insufficient brakes.

This was where my left hand, also known as "Mr. Fist," took over control of my arm and slapped him upside the head.

...Well, OK, maybe not. I did have to butt in, however, and explain how the small wheels mean a scooter can do a u-turn within a single parking space, how modern scooters have perfectly workable brakes, and that there aren't many situations where a lack of power is what causes the problem. I also explained why scooters are so much fun they should probably be illegal.

Biker-man, with his tattoos he'd had since he was seventeen (or so he claimed) and black t-shirt, was not impressed. I shrugged and went back to staring at the Ducati Hypermotard parked close by. You either get scooters, or you don't.