Quote:
Originally Posted by innerspaceboy
Quick background: I'd walked to my last several jobs for over a decade and had no use for a car so I let my license expire. LESSON: Never let your license expire. No matter how sure you are that you'll never need to drive again.
Fast-forward to the present. I've been standing in sh*t weather in Buffalo for the better part of a year for 3.5 hours a day trekking back and forth to my new job by a miserably underfunded and unreliable mass transit system that routinely cancels routes on a whim. I got a permit back in July and have been waiting out the 6-month stretch so I can take the course and a road test, buy a car and FINALLY start driving again.
Today, out of curiosity, I checked with the DMV and it turns out that not only am I not required to take driver's ed to replace my expired license, but the 6-month permit waiting period also doesn't apply to drivers over 18! That means that I could have been driving since last July!
I tried scheduling a road test but quickly learned that my situation is an extreme anomaly. The automated systems require me to enter the certificate number from my driving school because they expect me to be a 16-year-old kid. And there is no human number to call. When I finally got a number I went through 10-minutes of prompts and was placed 36th in the hold queue.
Five hours back and forth emailing the DMV and the road test agency and I've finally arrived at a theory that a copy of my Driving Record should be sufficient to prove that I am not a new driver and am exempt from driving school.
There are 2 ways to get a copy. The DMV pays a third-party to phish your info for the low, low price of $51 and they'll email it to you instantly.
Or I can fill out a DMV form, get it notarized, and purchase a money order for the $10 it costs to file.
And even after jumping through all those hoops, I have to mail it off to Albany and wait god knows how many months for my Record to arrive.
It's a miserably inefficient system, but I'm doing what I've got to do to make this happen.
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I was 18 or 19 when I got my license and just went down to the DMV and did the written test, failed, went back, passed, did my driving test, passed. That was the entirety of it. Way to suck.