Lights On? Check! Anyone Home? Nope!

About six weeks ago, my sister broke her ankle. Due to other mobility issues she has, it is going to be a long recovery with physical therapy, so her doctor provides her with the form to get a six-month disabled parking permit with all the medical information filled out already. All she has to do is fill out the top part and return it.

Unfortunately, she misreads part of the form and misses filling out a box before mailing it in. Our main DMV is extremely slow, so it takes five weeks for them to return the form and her check, and they tell her to try again. As she needs to get out of the house more now for her physical therapy appointments, waiting a second five weeks is not an option.

I happen to be at her house helping out when the mail is returned, so I do some research and see that there is a contract facility — not DMV employees — nearby that can process the form on-site and is open at that very moment.

Me: “Go ahead and fix the form, and I’ll take it and your check and get it taken care of for you.”

Once it is my turn, I give the lady the form and the check and she begins processing the form. The only problem is that I am not the person who wrote the check. This is my fault; I didn’t think about it since I was just grabbing the stuff that had been mailed and didn’t think about them needing to check ID in person, since they couldn’t do that by mail anyway.

As they are trying to figure out what to do:

Me: “Actually, I have cash!”

They don’t take credit cards, and they have an ATM on-site for people to get cash to pay with, so I know they take cash. But no, they have now locked onto this check, so we go through three supervisors that are trying to figure out what to do.

Supervisor: “Here’s what we’ll do. Since you share a last name with [Sister], we’ll take your ID and hold you responsible if the check bounces.”

Every single person declined my offer to just pay the $10 in cash to move things along, even when I had it in my hand.  

It was crazy, but at least I walked out with the permits in hand. Lesson learned: just always take cash to this location.