Renewing my driver's license
Submitted by FatherSean on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 18:49.
The other day I renewed my driver's license. It had expired in May. I went to the office, took a number, filled up the form and had to wait only one or two minutes before my application was processed. I had to deal with only one clerk and the transaction, including payment, took less than a minute. There was no fine for having let my license expire. I had spent only about ten minutes in the office. I left with my recepit, knowing that I'll receive my new license by mail within a day or two.
This was Dublin, Ireland, not the Philippines where it now takes two to three hours but before used to take more than a day to get through everything.
In the Philippines you have to renew your license every three years during your birth month. In Ireland your licence is valid for ten years but only up to the age of 70. The process in the Philippines has been simplified and you can get it now in about two hours. When I renewed my license in Bacolod City in 2003 it took more than a day going from one office to another, and going through a farcical drugs test and an even more farcical 'medical' test. Because of a mistake in a computer in Manila the Bacolod office was unable to issue my license, though the receipt served as a temporary one.
Three years later I went to another city in Negros Occidental to renew my license. I discovered that they had introduced a new 'hoop' - you had to give a tax number. When I came to the last part the machine that produced the ID-type licence wasn't functioning.
Bureaucracy in the Philippines seems, for the most part, to be designed to make life difficult for people, especially the poor, who are often taken advantage of. A taxi-driver or jeepney-driver, in addition to paying the fee for his license, loses time for working, which before could be more than a day. One of the very few good things done under the Marcos regime was the simplification of the process of renewing your driver's license but under one of his successors the whole thing was fouled up again.
Electric jeepney outside Bacolod Cathedral
- 1339 reads
Driver's license arrives in the mail
This morning my new Irish driver's license arrived in the mail, less than 48 hours after I had applied for it. Bureaucrats are often criticised but in this case they could not have done better, God bless them.
Post new comment