A number of years ago I was driving to work and listening to NPR when I heard a piece about the psychology behind (and stress we create for ourselves by) putting off relatively simple, but perhaps tedious, tasks. The speaker was a professor at a university. He was, by all accounts, perfectly capable of handling mundane daily tasks yet found himself nearly losing his driver’s license because he had delayed some administrative task like getting his car registered or inspected. He listed some of the barriers he faced, not knowing where to go or what paperwork he needed, as part of his procrastination, and then he talked about the guilt he felt – almost every day – for not getting this taken care of. It weighed on him. He worried about getting pulled over… he would take back roads or avoid doing certain things – yet, day after day, he put it off. He had adjusted his life to this ever-present oversight. I listened and I appreciated the self-aware honesty of his story. I know I’ve found myself in that type of a situation before… maybe not to the point of nearly losing my license, but to the point where I feel like I’m failing to adult properly. I’ve put things off, simply because they are a complete hassle to take care of properly. They either require several steps through a web of bureaucratic entanglement, or the barriers to success just feel too high for the amount of time I’ll need to invest.
I don’t have my social security card. This too makes me feel like I’m failing as an adult. To be fair, you don’t usually need the actual card for anything. I know my ss number, I just don’t have the card. For the longest time, I carried it in my wallet – which may or may not have been the brightest idea. Then I suspect I had it filed away with important papers – maybe even in a lockbox. That’s what responsible adults do. The card was a flimsy beat up thing. It didn’t really look all that official. I don’t know when I lost possession of it… honestly, I can’t even say for sure that I lost possession of it. I’ve lived out of boxes for the past year and a half, it might be in one of those. Barrier number one: I don’t feel like going through every piece of paper looking for this. It doesn’t have to be lost in a gutter or ditch to be lost. I know I’m not alone on this. When my ex-fiancée moved in with me, she had a box labeled “papers I haven’t looked at in years” I’ll say it again, I feel like a failure as an adult not having this part of my life more organized.
The other day I wrote about buying a car or saving my money or buying a house or just retiring to the tropics because that seems easier than the other options. This is how I get when faced with too many bullshit or big decisions. I should have put in the caveat, that these are all first-world problems. For context, this morning, listening to NPR, I heard the story of a nurse in the Middle East who has had to fight her entire life (forced to marry at 15 and drop out of high school, a culture that shuns women in the medical profession, etc. etc.) to finish school and become a nurse. She makes about $600 a month and never sees her kids. She’s volunteered to care for COVID patients. I feel like shit even complaining about something as dumb as not being able to decide between my old car and a new car. Comparatively speaking, my tribulations are minor. Nevertheless, not being able to see through a fogged up window with balding tires in slick road conditions… these are my current battles.
If I don’t buy a car, I need to get my car registered and inspected. In order to register my car, I need to show my PA driver’s license. Except I don’t have one of those. I just moved back to PA. So… I need to get a PA driver’s license. As a new resident in the state, I have to do this in person. Barrier number 2: nobody wants to go to the DMV. Once there, I have to present my current license and my ss card…. You can probably see where this is going. I don’t have my ss card. Three different times, I’ve tried to get my ss card re-issued. The online portal boasts that it’s easy and quick. On the surface, it seems like it would be easy and quick. Fill out some info, upload a picture of your license, and your done. Unless of course, the upload doesn’t take. I tried this a few times – the upload wouldn’t take. The other option is to fill out some credit information which makes me hyper-aware of just how much the government knows about my finances (or at least what credit card accounts I have). It also makes me extra cautious about that .gov domain name – maybe it’s spoofed – this would be the perfect way to get credit card info and an ss number. Throwing caution to the wind, I tried this option as well. It too did not take – they said they couldn’t match my information (probably because I moved and my credit cards have only been at my new address for a month). After a few attempts, I was locked out, and had to wait 24 hours to try again. Barrier number 3 (or 4, I’m not really counting): send me away from your site feeling like a failure with instructions to try again tomorrow almost guarantees I will not be trying again tomorrow. More time passes – all the while, I become more aware that I’m supposed to register my car within a month or less.
This morning, I tried again. To my delight, the photo upload worked. I filled out the information. I indicated that my license was not my address, etc. etc. At the very end, the .gov site said they’d mail my card in 7 to 10 business days and prompted me to enter my address. I entered it and the site told me it couldn’t process my request – my address didn’t match. I tried again – same result. Fearing I might get locked out again, I entered my old address in Memphis. Success. Except, now my card is being mailed to Memphis, where I no longer live. Hopefully, it will get forwarded to me here in Pennsylvania. But, I know how slowly the mail has been moving. A week or two ago I got an unemployment document that was sent to my address in Memphis. It had taken almost a month for it to get from PA to TN, and then another few days for the forwarding. There’s nothing quite like the secure feeling knowing that your Social Security card is being intentionally mailed to the wrong address while you drive an uninspected car because you can’t get the linchpin document required to set everything in motion.
This isn’t the first bureaucratic headache I’ve had with moving. It won’t be the last. I didn’t vote in our last election. I tried to register in TN, but stopped short when I read the voter declaration: “I, being duly sworn on oath (or affirmation) declare that the above address is my legal residence and that I plan to remain at such residence for an undetermined period of time and say that to the best of my knowledge and belief all of the statements made by me are true.” I had already filed my paperwork to move out of state. My time at my residence was very much determined. I then tried to register in PA, but PA law says you need to be a resident for 30 days prior to the election (I would only be a PA resident for about 15 days. I was ineligible in both states. And sure, I probably could have registered and voted in TN, but I can be a bit of rules follower when it comes to these things. I just wish they made it a little easier to follow the rules.
What I find so infuriating about this is the number of steps I need to complete in order to get my car inspected and registered properly and the lack of consistency across states on things as basic as identifications and voter registrations. Tennessee did not require my ss card to get a new license. Why aren’t these rules the same from state to state? But even more aggravating is that I could whisper in a conversation that I’m looking at buying a Honda and because my phone is creepily listening in on me, my Facebook page will be full of Honda ads. I could google Little Debbie snacks and suddenly every social media platform is hitting me with targeted ads for ding dongs, devil dogs, and krimpets. However, when I’m intentional about what I’m trying to accomplish – it’s roadblock after roadblock. I could submit to the US government a change of address form, and submit, also to the US government, all of the information required to secure a new ss card, and they somehow can’t match these things up. Why can advertising follow me so closely and meet my every “need” and suggest lots of things I don’t need, but large federal systems can’t? We have amazing technology when commerce is involved and pathetic (comparatively speaking) technology when services are involved. Our voting system is downright archaic compared to the big data employed to tell my that if I like Honda, I might also like a Toyota, or that I should listen to “Baby Got Back” because “Fonda ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda.”
This morning I left the house to head to work, and one exit past where I got on the highway, traffic was at a standstill. Our side of the highway was closed and after crawling along for 15 or 20 minutes all traffic had to u-turn and head the other way. I almost gave up and went home. I don’t know the back roads, and my gps hadn’t caught up with the traffic jam. I pulled over, mapped a different route, and drove some side streets to get back to the highway. The story on NPR was an interview with country singer Chris Stapleton. I don’t care much for country music – but he seemed down to earth and very real. He talked about losing his dog (of course) but also about struggling relationships, focusing on what matters in life, and feeling nostalgic for his once quiet life in his home city of Nashville – a place and life he doesn’t quite recognize anymore.
That’s when I started to get choked up. It felt like it could break – there in my junkie, but usually reliable, car on some back road in a town with two stoplights. All of it: the morning bureaucracy, the nurse’s story, the traffic jam, the honestly sad country singer talking about loss, the hassle of not being able to get these small things taken care of… all of it hit me. I know I’ve gone all Andy Rooney here. Old man Uhler bitching about the most inconsequential things. In proper context, these things are quite minor. But, they have a cumulative effect. As that professor in that story had explained, he felt worry, on a daily basis. It gnawed at him. And so there I was, feeling sad for Chris Stapleton, and myself, and the nurse, wondering what on earth I was doing (what are any of us doing?) and why can’t any of these things just fall into place.