A DMV Tragedy

        When I turned 16, I was over the moon to finally be able to get my drivers license and all the freedom of driving myself to school in the morning and to my friends houses on the weekends. I went into the DMV on a Tuesday (yes I remember the day, as it would become a very terrible experience) to get my picture taken and officially get my drivers license. My mom and I walked into the building and the line was almost entirely to the door, and it was only 11:00 AM. We proceeded to wait in line for 3 hours before being able to actually talk to any kind of DMV employee. During that time I watched as numerous employees appeared to be highly relaxed while their customers waited anxiously and impatiently. I saw two ladies talking for 15 minutes, and laughing with each other before each calling forward their next customers. I watched a man take 4 separate coffee breaks in the course of 3 hours. No one seemed concerned with getting through the line, or being productive. Rather, customers waited for hours, and often times appeared to leave unhappy and unsatisfied with the directions they were given. The complications of the DMV, and the problems in how it is run and the customer service it has provided appears to have only increased since the COVID-19 pandemic too.

       From conversation in class, I have found that the things I witnessed that day are examples of shirking, or what happens when employees or agents do not perform the responsibilities or duties they were hired to do, or perform tasks fit to fulfill their own preferences rather than what they were assigned to do.  The DMV employees are on a salary, and do not have much incentive to get through the long line of customers, given that their output is difficult to measure (a dilemma that arises in bureaucracies such as the DMV), they gain no additional profit themselves for getting more customers through the line at any given day, and proper, strict supervision appears to be lacking in many of these institutions. There are some that suggest privatizing this bureaucratic system to solve these apparent structural inefficiencies, but driving and handling vehicle registrations is commonly seen as a public right, and privatizing this industry may create barriers for people to receive proper licenses.