There is a new deal in this state (and possibly everywhere else) about driver's licenses.
You can opt for the mail-in type, with your old photo, which I prefer, or this new ID photo which requires a birth certificate, a marriage certificate (both of which have to have been stamped by a state or county person), an unlaminated and unmessed up Social Security card (those two requirements do not work well together),
a proof of identity such as a bill with your address on it, and I suspect they will be examining my teeth and asking me if I can walk a straight line with my eyes closed.
If I decide not to get the Scary One, I will be unable to enter any government buildings or travel by plane anywhere in the US. That means if I commit a federal crime I will be unable to attend my own trial, or be incarcerated in a Federal Prison. There is hope yet.
But it also means I can no longer be allowed to be in the military, or enter a Federal courthouse for any reason. And that may also mean I won't be able to enter post offices either. It gets weird.
I was among the last wave of people in NJ required to get photo licenses instead of the old paper ones. The whole thing made it very difficult for anyone foreign born. No foreign birth certificates, etc permitted. Good thing I had a passport. At that time I used a po box, so no bills etc with street address available. As they should have known, since my old driver's license listed the po box as my address..many people had to make multiple attempts to get valid licenses renewed. I did get through it finally. It required a minimum of six original documents.
ReplyDeleteAnd now photo id is required all over the place. Banks, doctors offices, it's everywhere I tell you!
I can't say the standard of driving reflects the difficulty of getting the license. Unless I'm encountering a wave of people without them.
We've had photo ids for as long as I've been driving, which is about 35 years.(Just call me a late bloomer) And now this new wrinkle, which causes me a certain glow of terror;
ReplyDeleteI have two versions of my SS card, the one I got when we moved up here (as a replacement for the one i thought I had lost) and the one I thought I had lost but hadn't. It was also a lot easier in those days to get a replacement. A few bucks, fill out a form at the P.O. and a few weeks later you got your new one.
Now you need to sell your soul. However, one of them is laminated, and they don't want that. (the cards, not the soul" Nor do they want a tatty one, which is usually the end result of not laminating them. sigh.
My husband sailed through his, but as I like to remind him, he never had a name change. I've had two, but we aren't talking about the first one, and I hope they don't know about it. Being adopted can cause entirely too many problems, sometimes.
I do begin to feel like a Person of Suspicion, I must say. The part about not being allowed to fly in one's own without a valid driver's license is a bit weird...
When my mother cavalierly threw her driver's SS card away, in the last year she was alive, I thought I'd do her a favor and get a new one for her. She was 'an alien", and I needed to send SSecurity gobs of proof that an 89 year old woman was who she said she was, and had never tried to blow up an embassy. And I was supposed to also send them "original' copies of everything, and my own stuff as well.
I realized that if this got lost in the mail, I was whipped for life,since most of my stuff could not be recovered...at least not as original.
All that and a processing fee and registered mail and a one month wait. No. I passed on that.
The new so called real id is coming to NJ. Requirements exactly the same as the old one. But you get a little icon on the license. And anyway you can fly with a passport even with old one. So I wonder how many people will bother. Of course my passport has expired...
ReplyDeleteI didn't want to bother, but as my husband said, 'federal buildings' (which is what is listed on ours) includes the Social Security office, possibly the Post Office, and since neither of us have passports, we are officially grounded from in-country flights. If we ever want to go on one. And I have a hunch we couldn't even get a passport without one of these, once it takes effect.
ReplyDeleteAnd ours also states that you hafta have a new photo. bummer.
''Rules'' are getting weirder by the day.
ReplyDeleteBefore too long, money will no longer exist and we will all have micro chip implants and then the world will end ... or something.
Deletesorta like pets do now. If we got lost, they could find us a lot faster. Or, at least, what's left of us.
Sometimes I think new 'rules' and new "laws' are not always for the reasons we think they are.
The old license system worked, yeah, sometimes it got messed with, but this isn't better, just harder to implement.I strongly suspect that this is a dandy way to snoop. I spent an hour today hunting down a 'real' birth certificate, our marriage license, the unlaminated SS card that we no longer need but have to have (oh I love that one) and a tax bill if we are property owners. That's a LOT of info for a driver's license.
At this point in the proceedings, I figger by the time the world ends I won't be here to mind. and if I am, I probably won't care.
We are all going to have to have one by next year. I just got my driver’s license renewed and my picture taken. We have to have this done every four years in PA. This will not be accepted if I need to fly next year and I don’t have a passport. It is a PIA to have to gather all this info, but we have no choice.
ReplyDeleteI can’t imagine being carded at the Post Office.
Mine is up for renewal anyway, and Luddite that I am, I would have been perfectly satisfied with the old one (send them the money they send you a renewal. No new photo necessary. YES!
DeleteWe get five years, here, I think. I cant imagine being carded anywhere, and that's part of what galls me. Im wondering what someone does if they have to get to the SS office, and they don't have the new card?