What a difference a couple thousand miles makes!

My daughter is in the process of moving to California to go to college. I have lived through this before, with the Number 1 Son who moved to San Francisco three years ago, so by now I’m an old hand at packing a substantial cornucopia of personal effects into a microscopic subcompact car. We are sending the second-born off with the same amount of paperwork, insurance coverage, address book with names and numbers of relatives she can barely remember, gift cards, and our best wishes.

The top item on her agenda is getting her vehicle registration changed. (She has already changed her driver license on her 18th birthday.) In California, this not only involves proof of insurance, a statement of facts regarding the car and title application, but the car also has to pass a smog test.

The true genius of the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is the ability to make an appointment. Granted, it’s an appointment to stand in line, but at least your wait isn’t as long as those poor suckers who decided to wander in off the street.

The bad thing about the appointment process is that some DMV offices are booked up for weeks in advance. Who’da thought that the Oceanside DMV wouldn’t have an opening until sometime in September?

It’s possible to make your appointment online, which I was successful in doing two out of the last three times. Yesterday, their DMV computer was in crash mode, so I ended up calling the 800 number to make the appointment.

This is where you may insert heavenly bliss at the DMV. The operator I happened to get (I think her name was Carol, if not, sorry, whomever you are), was not only helpful to a fault, she was one cheerful, happy person. Scratch that, her mood was that of exuberant joyousness. Her mirthful glee had me wondering what kind of lunch Carol had ingested that day. Liquid? Pill form? Or wacky tobacky?

People are so different out on the Left Coast.

Blissful Carol went out of her way to find another DMV office near Oceanside with an opening on the 18th. She directed me to smog testers in the area. She informed me that AAA could also take the vehicle registration if we were AAA members, and then we wouldn’t need our appointment at the DMV. Then she told me humorous Californian stories while waiting for her computer to tally up the total bill. ($113. Not bad. Less expensive than Michigan.)

It’s not often when you can find someone who enjoys his/her job at all, much less with this level of intensity. Even I have my moments of work ambivalence, when I answer the phone with less than ecstasy and with my tone bordering terse. But, for a person who works at the DMV to be so jovial at all, much less at three in the afternoon, makes me feel ashamed of my sometimes-abrupt tonality and sour attitude.

By the end of our conversation, I didn’t want to say goodbye to Helpful Carol. She was just too freaking fun to talk to. I implored her to come to Michigan and give personality lessons to our own Secretary of State employees. God knows they need a primer on polish and courtesy.

If she did, I might enjoy standing in line there the next time I have to renew my license.