As luck would have it, my wife and I have landed, temporarily, in a place we never expected to live. Oklahoma. It's a long story, but in a nutshell, we sold our home out west before the housing market crashes, and we're still looking for our idyllic energy-efficient hippy place. But we had to stay somewhere in the meantime, and family had a vacant place in Tulsa, so here we are.
We've met some excellent people here, but we've met others who are just jaw-dropping, fuck-all stupid. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Maybe it has something to do with the churches on every freaking street corner. (Including one in a strip-mall called "Dominion Chapel."
Anyway, we're going to be here a few months, and the law says you have to get a new driver's license within one month. Sigh. We have to become actual citizens. So we head off to the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety to get processed.
The first thing we notice is a laminated sign, right on the front counter, which says "It is a crime in Oklahoma to curse or swear in front of women or children, punishable by a fine and blah blah blah." (I don't know what happens if it's women or children who do the actual swearing.) I feel like asking the driver's license examiner "WTF?", but, eh, it's a woman. Better not to go there.
So we hand over the usual papers and stuff, and have an "Oh Shit" moment when the search on my name turns up outstanding warrants from another state. Doh! The lady checks my birthdate and Social Security number, and it turns out the warrants are for someone else. Whew.
Then as we go through the process, the nice lady asks us both to put our index fingers on this little touchpad, so our fingerprints can be scanned. Um. OK. I guess we have no choice. But this is creepy for two reasons. First of all, every other dirty, nose-picking, flu-having motherfucker that's come through here today has also touched this pad, and you can tell by the grime that they don't clean it very often. Also, we haven't done anything criminal, but here we are getting digitally fingerprinted!
And we have to get the usual photograph, but I read later that Oklahoma also does biometric face scans, so presumably that's what happened while our pictures were taken. Nice. And then we had to sign a digital notepad.
So now the state of Oklahoma has my name and address, birthdate, Social Security number, facial scan, fingerprints, and digital signature. The creepiness factor is climbing. And then the nice lady says we have to go next door to get our actual license, because Oklahoma is one of two states that don't actually issue the licenses themselves ... it's done by private vendors!
So we go next door to the private company, and while we're in line we notice a few things. Like about 20 variations of "Jesus" vanity plates you can put on the front of your car. (Oklahoma doesn't require regular front plates.) And to be fair, there are also several kinds of plates for Indian tribes, but ... um ... God-plates in a driver's license office? And then there are also the dozens of style variations you can get for your actual legal plates, like university plates, Ducks Unlimited, and you guessed it, "Choose Life." In fact, there's a huge fucking "Choose Life" poster on the wall, encouraging you to buy that style.
We finally get to the front of the line, and hand over the legal paperwork from the DPS office next door. But we have to go through the whole fingerprint, photo/face scan, digital signature thing AGAIN. In a PRIVATE office. So now, not only does the State of Oklahoma have all our personal info, so does some private entity. In reading later, I learned that all these measures are to reduce identity theft, but I have a sinking feeling that our info is now in some other Homeland Security database somewhere. And in this private company's system too. Beautiful.
So that's our creepy Oklahoma driver's license story. Oh, and there wasn't a voter registration form in sight anywhere.