This article is from the October issue of Breezes. Pick up a copy and start reading today!

Minnesotans can’t drive. It’s a fact. No need to be insulted by it. I’m a Minnesotan myself and even I can agree with the idea. Our inability to properly operate motor vehicles seems to have given the government the idea that what we need is a central organization to teach us how to drive. Instead, we got the DMV.

The Department of Motor Vehicles is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. However, it is potentially one of the least user friendly departments that we, as teenagers, have to involve ourselves with. Every year the freshmen and sophomores meet after school for several days a week for multiple weeks to learn how to drive by sleeping through a lecture, watching a few almost funny videos, and asking their neighbors to recap what had just happened. That’s how we Minnesotans learn to drive. Then we go on over to our friendly, almost never actually local DMV and take a test that will tell us whether or not we have earned the right to get behind the wheel legally. Instead of practicing driving, we just memorize the answers that the Safeway app gives us and spit them back out onto the test, leaving our little cubicles with the newfound ability to drive.

That is, of course, assuming you ever get to take the test, a task made difficult by one thing: the line. Regardless of whether you want to schedule your test ahead of time or try your luck with a walk in, you are guaranteed a long wait time. You can arrive two hours before the DMV opens only to end up tenth in line, nine other poor souls in front of you hoping that they, too, will make it. More often than not, however, anyone farther than eighth in line will wait all day only to go home no closer to being licensed, not only wasting a day, but trapping themselves into a spot where they are forced to have food delivered to them if they want to eat something. The alternative is to search the internet for an open time to make an appointment, the earliest available time generally being four months out and in another city.

In reality, it’s fair to recognize that the DMV isn’t an entirely terrible organization. It helps to keep the people who really shouldn’t be on the road off of the road, and it teaches all Minnesotans how to drive following the same set of laws. It also can’t be denied that behind the good intentions lay a painful set of intricacies that leave you wondering how you, of all people, got to be such a good driver.