The last stop in our normalization process sent us to the offices of the Secretaría De Movidad, the Mexican equivalent of the Transportation Department, which also runs the equivalent of the stateside DMV, or the BMV, depending on where you live. Wherever you live, it is a visit most people dread, since the bureaucrats who process drivers licenses are universally considered some of the most inept and/or incompetent on the planet.
(Note: not intending to insult any of my former state and local government colleagues; just making an observation. While I am on thin ice, may I take a moment and request that my Washington, DC-based friends join me in fighting the use of the phrase “the Dee-Emm-Vee” to refer to the Washington metropolitan area? I hear it with increasing frequency on local radio and TV, and it needs to be crushed as quickly as possible. It is Washington, or DC, or NoVa if you live on the correct side of the Potomac. Why would anyone want to borrow such an odious acronym? What’s next, a new car called the Edsall? A new dirigible called the Hindenburg?)
Sorry, end of rant. The SDM complex is in Guadalajara, and we arrived on a recent Tuesday after the long Semana Santa holiday. That detail is important, since the government offices had been closed for two weeks, creating much pent up demand for licenses. We entered the building and got in a long line, which naturally stretched out into a central courtyard under the tropical sun. The line crept forward, about ten people at a time. A man with an official looking lanyard was giving advice on the testing procedures, and offering to sell a quick look at “sample” test question for a few pesos (free-marker capitalism at work). After about an hour, we worked our way up to the first guard official, who was controlling access to the office.
When he let us pass with a cursory glance at our paperwork, we were in the entrance hall, where four officials were set up to review our paperwork. They ensured we had a valid visa, copies of our passports and US drivers licenses, and a bill or other document attesting to our current address in Mexico. When they approved, we were let into the main office through another guarded doorway.
This room held about 70 plastic chairs which were numbered, and we were directed to take a seat at the very back. One at a time, the applicant at the front of the room was called forward to the next available official, and the rest of the room got up and moved forward one chair. This went pretty quickly, and within 30 minutes we were being processed, but the musical chairs approach was a sight to behold. According to Francisco, who accompanied us through the process, they used to give out numbers, but people would pay others to get a number for them, so they made it a more physical process. I will admit it was quite orderly, and even when too many people were let in the room by the gate guards, everybody quickly re-established the queue.
Once we were called forward, a nice official took our paperwork and entered it into the computer system, then had us verify it was correct. We were asked our blood type, whether we wanted to be organ donors, and what was our current phone number. Next we went for photographs and fingerprints, which took about 5 minutes, and soon we were in line for the written test.
Most of the people getting their first licenses were very young. If we had been 60 or over, we could have skipped all the waits and gone straight to the front of the line, but we waited with the young people. We had some fun conversations with Mexicans who spoke excellent English and had been through the same process in the States. Finally, our turn to test came up.
The written test is just ten questions on a computer kiosk, but you must answer all ten correctly. Make a mistake, and you either have to take a training course or come back to retest in two weeks. They show you a video or a road sign and give you three choices for what you should do, or what the sign means. We asked for the “examen en ingles” and both Judy and I were routed to kiosks for the gringos where we were supposed to get an English-language version.
The key word here is “supposed,” because we were dealing with computers, so of course, things started to go wrong. On my computer, one side of the screen read “El pregunto no requiere un imagen.” The other side had three answers, in English. Hmmmmm. It took me a minute, but I figured out that the left side said “No image was required for this question” but how was I to answer without a sign or question? When the official initialized my test, he simply hit the forward button, so I tried that. Now I was on Pregunto Dos, with the same “no image” on the left and three new answers on the right. Not good. I hit it one more time, and of course, the same result: Pregunto Tres, new answers.
I looked up from my kiosk (a no-no) and saw Judy with a similarly perplexed look. We gave each other a shoulder shrug. We could not talk, nor could we get the attention of the officials who were administering the test. Judy later told me she decided the “test” was fixed, so she started hitting any answer just to get through it. I started waving my hands over my head and said “Una Problema!”
This got the official’s attention, and he was none too happy, not so much with me, but at the distraction from his well-planned administration of the test site. He came to my kiosk, grimaced at the screen, then started re-initializing the test and downloading the English language images (a-HA!). I pointed at Judy, and he went to her kiosk to effect the same fix. However, I was still on question three! So I dutifully answered the rest of the questions. The screen told me I got seven out of ten correct, and the test was done. Oh-oh.
I got in line to see the official proctoring the test, and when my turn came I started to explain “only seven questions” but he waved me off and said “no, no, ok.” He stamped my form and sent me on my way; Judy got the same treatment. Somehow we “passed.” We got in line for the driving test, where a name check and our US licenses got us past the requirement. Now we just had to pay at one window, then wait about 40 minutes at the second for our final license.
All told, about four hours, not including travel time. Francisco, who we retained to assist us, was able to accompany us throughout (except at the test kiosks), which greatly improved the experience. It was a typically Mexican experience, with high and no-tech abiding side-by-side, long lines but orderly movement, and everybody invariably polite. We just heard the Mexican government is introducing an online registration system that will reduce the experience to just the written and driving tests, so perhaps we experienced this particular bit of Mexico just before it passed into history.