She just got her hair styled last night, and some of her colleagues, all women, of course, complimented on it. She felt that superficial satisfaction. She doesn't take coffee in the morning; for her, it's an afternoon ritual to counter the fatigue that inevitably accumulates around 3PM when two more hours are left at this branch of the Connecticut DMV. Her eyes are tired, but it was already Friday, and although the office was open the next day, she would have it off.
She logged in to the computer. She could sense the joy and desperation from the growing line of people having some business with a driver's license. But she didn't care. Her facial expression changed no more than any other time in the twelve years she had worked here. She knew her place, which is to say, she knew she was above everyone here in the room on the other side of the counter. At the DMV, she learned very early on, human beings were equalized in the fairest way. Regardless of one's social status, income level, connections, or looks, everyone had to wait and go through the hellish processes involved at the DMV. At the same time, on her side of the counter were the demigods that looked down on the equalized human creatures and at best pretend to smile and pretend they were the servants working for a government that served these beggars of services.
The computer was going through the process of logging her in and revealing forms for her to type in when was ready to dish out the services requested, or besieged, by the populace before her. She had seen many different people. This was one place where you get the best sampling of people in the state of Connecticut. Or at least, in this corner of Southern Connecticut, where there were rich people, lots of poor people, and an endless supply of people with funny passports because of the universities in the area. She had learned to speak sternly but clearly to anyone who didn't understand English well, most of whom were Latinos. She had learned to avoid looking annoyed when someone was translating what she was saying to Spanish to someone who seemed clueless about anything and everything in this country of hers. She had, in essence, perfected the art of indifference.
The first customer was a teenager looking timid and dwarfed by the confidence of his mother. He hardly spoke and when he did he was barely audible; the mother, in essence, was a translator for the speaker of a language from a different age group. She could tell what they were going to ask by noticing the envelop and form in his clasp. But she didn't want to say more than she had to, and let the people speak for themselves. She heard someone in the line thanking God that another window opened up. True, for nearly half an hour now, on a Friday, only one person was working at the counter, which was why the line kept growing. There really were two colleagues, but one got sucked into the twilight zone looking for lost records regarding this little old woman who was the cause of the disappearance of 50% of the workforce for the license line. The colleague that seemed to be looking for the little old lady's lost records was a tall, nearly completely bald, old man two years from retirement. He had for the last couple of weeks been clutching a walking stick wherever he went. She never felt pity for him. He was a man of questionable ethics, hit on her ever since the beginning, subsided a bit, but then resumed with greater ferocity after she finally divorced her abusive husband who left her with no children (thank God!).
After taking the photo of the reticent young man, she asked them to wait and then resumed her swivel seat in front of the old computer. She paused, knowing, again, that the next person in line was feeling triumphant that finally it was his turn. She let that triumph implode in its own hollowness before telling him to approach the window.
Then there was a loud woman. There would always be a loud woman. Nearly every day, or at least every other day, she would hear some loud woman, sampled equally among all races, income level, social status, etc. Today's sample was a divorcée. It was never hard to know their life story because these loud people were too used to trying to get everyone's attention. She was talking to a soft-spoken woman with an African accent. She could tell the accents by now, having so much experience associating accents with passports. The permanent bags under her eyes seemed to be weighed down by the experience of these sort of trivialities. She briefly looked up to see what peace breaker it was. While the room is never quiet, it always sustained a base level of noise that was low and even enough to become background noise. No one laughed particularly loud, no complaints, and there were many, were particularly audible. People mumbled, cursed internally, but normally the atmosphere was doldrums of helpless sheep following orders. But that quiet status quo would often be pierced, broken, thankfully temporarily, by people like the woman in front of her. She was telling the African woman, but really the whole room, that she had just gotten a divorce, that she was relieved, very happy, happy to have gotten rid of a loser who was abusive, obsessive, and that he got a lashing from the judge, which he clearly deserved, especially having threatened her. She heard everything, just as the whole room heard everything. There was a sign at the counter clearly stating that once at the counter, a customer couldn't be using the phone. She thought the same restriction should be applied to loud talking, except that it should be pasted at the entrance doors.
The divorced woman was her next customer. And again, the woman redeclared that she was divorced and started talking again about what a relief it was. But the DMV lady, who had gone through a far worse divorce process, had no patience for her and her loudness. She simply said, in a tone honed over the years to pierce the imbecilic hearts of every human being, "I just want to see your license." She said so with those tired, baggy eyes, with a voice that had made itself known and fizzled in the crowd called humanity for the past forty-seven years. She would have liked this loudmouth or anyone else to notice that she had a new haircut. But she knew that the world didn't work like that. Her haircut, for her, meant a turning point. It was the first time she treated herself to something beautiful since her divorce many years ago. She knew it was a turning point; in fact, she made it a turning point. But no one noticed, and while she had no more bitterness left to squeeze out of her frail heart, she simply grumbled a bit.
She looked up at the divorced woman, and while telling her which forms to fill out after having her picture taken, she observed her. She then concluded that, like all the people in the room, this woman was insignificant. Her story, which she so proudly tried to share with the world, made her even less significant. She saw the hollowness in her, for all she saw was a casket, a coffin, of a soul that had died at some point for reasons she didn't care to know. And when she was done with this worker ant of the colony, and had her sit down with other ants, she returned to the computer. This time she really didn't care about the next customer. She simply sat there, looking at the screen, and saw her name on the top-left of the screen. She nearly wanted to cry seeing that name, her own name.
