Last week and this weekend my brother and sister-in-law were in town on their way to and from Hawaii from the east coast. They were trying to ease the jet lag and have a quick visit.
We decided to rent a car. We did this on one other visit, and it was a nightmare. All the parking in my neighborhood is either residential or metered parking. Residential parking means that you can't park anywhere for more than 2 hours unless you have a sticker, and overnight parking doesn't begin until 8PM. The meters have a one-hour limit and they start again at 8AM, but you have to get up earlier because street cleaning happens at 6. This means you can't leave the car for more than two hours anywhere near my house, and overnight parking is a huge fucking problem.
This time, I decided to be very clever and get a temporary residential parking sticker for the rental car. In order to do this, you must actually have the rental car and the agreement. So after I picked up the car I drove it over to the DPT to do the paperwork.
Fans, the DPT is malicious motherfucking scam. The office is located in SOMA and surrounded by street parking where the meters are on a one-hour time limit. Inside the DPT, there are about 9 teller windows. Two of them are for paying fines only, and they were both open and staffed. One is for high-level problems and you have to be referred there by another teller. That one was open and staffed. Then there are 6 windows for regular transactions such as mine. Only two windows were staffed, some of the time.
This, of course, caused the line to grow very long. Then some people were granted no-wait status. (They had battled with the DPT before and had some kind of line exemption pass.) So you could be first in line but people would be cutting in front again and again. This happened to one woman for almost half an hour.
There was no way that you could get through the line in an hour. All the people who were parked on the street had their meters expire while standing in the office for problems with meters. And since were at the DPT headquarters, there were hordes of meter maids circling the building in their little carts giving tickets, yet none to staff the fucking windows. One girl was at the teller window and saw a meter maid writing up her car parked directly outside the DPT. She ran over to the window and started pounding on it and screaming, then ran outside to scream at the meter maid before returning to complete her transaction.
It was hard not to get really, really, really pissed off but the people in the line took the "we're all in this together" position instead of the usual infighting. We held each others' spots as we ran out to feed our meters. We made jokes and tried not to mob attack anyone with a front-of-the-line pass. When I got to the window, an hour and ten minutes later (I was the eighth person in line when I got there; more than 30 were lined up after me), my transaction took all of three minutes.
As my meter was about to run out, I asked the teller what I should do if I got a ticket while waiting in line for longer than the meter time. He replied, in the snittiest way possible, "If you think the ticket was given in error then you can come back here and contest it."
Fans, there is good reason that the DPT has bulletproof glass in front of the tellers. When you're ass-raping the general public, it's best to use protection.