Sign, sign, everywhere a sign....in English
Every four years the little envelope arrives in the mail and you renew your California Driver's License. It is an automatic thing, no big deal and I hadn't given it any thought the last two renewals which were done through the mail. Knowing that this year was a renewal year, when the envelope arrived, I fully expected yet another auto-renewal.
I was in for a surprise. "Because your last two renewals were done by mail, this year you must come in to the DMV, make any changes in your personal information as required, and take a vision test. Since I wear glasses, the vision test is no big deal, they don't make you take it until you are so old that your corrected vision might still be suspect, and I have no objection to providing accurate personal info or giving up a thumbprint. What I object to are the horrendous wait-times one experiences at the DMV. Especially since, as the sign says "Due to budget cuts, walk-ins will be cut off at 3:00 p.m., and only clients with appointments will be allowed to join the lines after three.
Wait a second you say, if you have an appointment, why would you be getting in line? Because even though you have an appointment, that's just a way to get you into a shorter, much faster moving line. I had an appointment when I went to the DMV on Friday and after I checked in, five minutes before my appointed time, I found there were seven people in line ahead of me, all of whom also had appointments.
Eventually I was waited on, paid my fee and after posing for a photo, got my temporary license. It was while waiting for the photo I overheard someone being asked if there was a particular langauge they wanted to take the written exam for a driver's license in. The person responsed they wanted to take the exam in Vietnamese and that got me to thinking.
We are so sensitive to immigrants we not only do not require them to learn English, we let them take the driver's license exam in other languages. That might well be no big problem except for one tiny little matter. THE STREET SIGNS LIKE SPEED LIMITS, STOP, YIELD, ETC, ARE ALL IN ENGLISH.
If an immigrant, legal or illegal, can't read the sign, we shouldn't be licensing them to drive on our streets. I don't want to be driving on the same street with people who don't know that "STOP" means what it says.
They don't have to learn the entire English language, but they should certainly know enough to be able to read the street signs.
I was in for a surprise. "Because your last two renewals were done by mail, this year you must come in to the DMV, make any changes in your personal information as required, and take a vision test. Since I wear glasses, the vision test is no big deal, they don't make you take it until you are so old that your corrected vision might still be suspect, and I have no objection to providing accurate personal info or giving up a thumbprint. What I object to are the horrendous wait-times one experiences at the DMV. Especially since, as the sign says "Due to budget cuts, walk-ins will be cut off at 3:00 p.m., and only clients with appointments will be allowed to join the lines after three.
Wait a second you say, if you have an appointment, why would you be getting in line? Because even though you have an appointment, that's just a way to get you into a shorter, much faster moving line. I had an appointment when I went to the DMV on Friday and after I checked in, five minutes before my appointed time, I found there were seven people in line ahead of me, all of whom also had appointments.
Eventually I was waited on, paid my fee and after posing for a photo, got my temporary license. It was while waiting for the photo I overheard someone being asked if there was a particular langauge they wanted to take the written exam for a driver's license in. The person responsed they wanted to take the exam in Vietnamese and that got me to thinking.
We are so sensitive to immigrants we not only do not require them to learn English, we let them take the driver's license exam in other languages. That might well be no big problem except for one tiny little matter. THE STREET SIGNS LIKE SPEED LIMITS, STOP, YIELD, ETC, ARE ALL IN ENGLISH.
If an immigrant, legal or illegal, can't read the sign, we shouldn't be licensing them to drive on our streets. I don't want to be driving on the same street with people who don't know that "STOP" means what it says.
They don't have to learn the entire English language, but they should certainly know enough to be able to read the street signs.
posted by me at 11:24 AM
