Geoff Duncan

Renewing a driver's licence is always a crapshoot. I mean, you can show up the instant the Department of Licensing opens its doors on a weekday and still be 30th in line. It's only every few years, but it always managed to kill at least two and a half hours, if not five or more.

My left and right eye see differently - not differently enough for me to need glasses or other corrective lenses, but enough that reading with one eye is considerably different than reading with the other. In the old days, I'd spend some of my two-and-a-half to five hours memorizing the eye chart on the back wall of the testing station with my "good eye" before they called my name. I figured that if my other eye stumbled over a letter (which never really happened), I could just plow through as though nothing were wrong.

In later years, they switched to little black boxes into which one peers in order to take the vision test. Presumably this is intended to prevent people like me from reading the chart from the back of the room then spitting out the appropriate responses when our turns came around. However, the system is fatally flawed. The rows of letters one is expected to read in the little black boxes are considerably shorter than an entire eye chart - only 12 letters per box. (Frankly, you could probably get by with memorizing the first six, because the folks behind the window tend to cut you off when if you say the first few correctly, quickly, and with authority.) The local department of licensing has five little boxes, meaning I had to memorize five sequences of 12 letters, one for each counter at the licensing bureau.

How did I do that? I sat in the front row of seats in the waiting area and listened as other folks renewing their licenses peered into the boxes and read off the letters. Turned out I didn't need to - I could read the letters just fine with both eyes - but it was amusing to find a new way to cheat.

Also overheard while renewing my driver's license: "Reality is a virtue in this day and age."