When I got married in June 2011, I took my ex-husband’s last name. Changing my name at the little local Social Security Office took about 15 minutes, if that. It was ridiculously easy. Eleven years later, I set about reversing the process. This time, it was not ridiculously easy. In fact, it was an Odyssey-style journey of the strangest bureaucratic interactions I have ever experienced in my life.
The first stop in my travels was the Shelby County Courthouse. Wait, let’s amend that. The first stop in my travels was finding a parking space near the Shelby County Courthouse. This took some time.
Once that task was accomplished, I entered the courthouse, armed with the knowledge of exactly where to go thanks to a wonderfully helpful person who had assisted me over the phone. She was hands-down the most accommodating government employee I’ve ever talked to, and procuring an official copy of my final decree of divorce from the courthouse turned out to be remarkably easy. I held on to the slim hope that maybe the entire day would follow suit. Alas. It was not to be.
My next stop was the Social Security Office. Upon entering, I was immediately reminded of the scene from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the Vogon (aka the galactic government bureaucrats) waiting room. I went to a screen that read “touch to begin,” an incongruous message as touching the screen began nothing. Once the screen and I came to terms, I hunkered down to wait. Many monitors around the room reminded us that our numbers may be called out of order. I experienced that this was indeed the case.
Eventually, I made my way to my designated window. The man behind the glass partition asked me how he could help me. I told him why I was there, to which he replied, “Oh, divorce? We only do divorce cases on Thursdays.” I knew that this could not possibly be true and that this man was joking.
And yet, he stared at me with such deadpan earnestness that I was completely thrown. He looked at me. I looked at him. We blinked.
“So,” I said uncertainly, “I should come back … tomorrow?”
“Yep.” He paused. “Nah, I’m just messin’ with you.”
I couldn’t decide if I was irritated.
The man looked through my documents and then casually asked, “So, what happened?” I shrugged helplessly, unsure how to sum up an entire marriage and subsequent divorce in small talk. “You don’t have an answer? I’m a stranger,” he continued. “You can tell me anything.”
As I awkwardly attempted to answer his question, his system went down and saved me the trouble. After waiting together in silence for 30 minutes, the system was restored and the issue handled. I left, still unsure if the interaction had been charming or frustrating.
My quest ended that day at the DMV. I went to one outside of Memphis, thinking that the wait wouldn’t be as long. I entered a vestibule that looked like it had been designed to trap the socially anxious. A zigzagging path snaked through about three feet of space, ending not in any clear destination but ambiguously in front of a long desk. A woman gestured for me to ignore the path.
After explaining my purpose, I signed in and once again settled in to wait. The woman called me to the counter, but when someone with the same last name (that I was ironically there to change) went ahead of me, she went ahead and took care of him. I allowed myself a quiet sigh.
Then it was my turn. We took my driver’s license photo six times. At the end of that debacle, I was handed a paper license bearing a hilariously exasperated photo of me. Then, I was told that I would need to come back. I expressed my confusion. I explained that I had all the documents that were needed. The woman said, “But they don’t have the right name on them.” To which I replied, turning it into a question, “My birth certificate has the correct name on it?”
She looked at me. I looked at her. We blinked.
Suffice it to say that I lost that particular showdown and will be returning to the DMV forthwith.
Coco June is a Memphian, mother, and the Flyer’s theater columnist.