The Elderly Takes on City Hall

Yesterday I went and paid our auto tax and got our license  stickers for another year.  We are required to get our vehicles emission annually tested to qualify to pay taxes. 

There are exceptions:  The Toyota Tacoma I bought in 2015 won't need an emission test until 2018.

And the Chevy truck and its owner (me) are too old, if that is, we don't drive over a certain amount of miles annually.    Since I only drove 1.4 miles with it in the past 12 months I qualified.

I was sitting waiting for my number to be called and the window I was closest to was an elderly man conducting his business, in a kind of a stupor way.

I overheard the clerk ask the man for his proof of emission test passed.  He said he didn't have one.

Taken back a little, she asked him if he had an exempt sheet.  He said he hadn't heard of that.

She ask him did he get an emission test last year.  No  The year before?  Nope, don't think so.

Did you bring your mileage in the years before?

No.

She was getting irritated, I could tell.

Then, my number was called.  I was tempted to pull out my phone/video and tell them I would skip this time I wanted to get this confrontation on camera.

But I didn't.  I conducted the business I was there for.

I told Anna this and she said, "What did she (the clerk) do?"

"She must have done something, he wasn't there - she got into our conversation (she was the next window over)".

The clerk waiting on me and I got sidetracked and she told me her husband, a policeman, used to be a police chief in a town in south Georgia.  She told me the name of the town but couldn't think of the county it was in.

The clerk dealing with the old man popped up and told us the county name we were trying to think of.  The lady waiting on me looked surprised that she knew her home county's name and also surprised she was riding our conversation.

I was surprised too - what happened to the old man?