drwex | Plan, meet reality

Plan: go online, fill out RMV form for license renewal, print out form, take form and documents (all carefully gathered) to RMV on Friday.

Actual:
- go online
- struggle to find form (RMV site is designed to be "helpful" which means it's of the form "Do you have question A? If so, you want option 1. Do you have question B? If so, you want option 2..." et cetera. Meanwhile, I'm like "JUST GIVE ME THE GODDAMN FORM YOU TOLD ME I NEEDED WHY ISN'T IT A LINK YOU IDIOTS?")
- find form, struggle with "fill out form online wizard".
- fill out form. Get to end of form. Discover that supporting document - passport - is expired.

Two guesses what you can't do with an expired passport; first guess doesn't count.

- Go find online form to renew passport.
- Assume you can do this the easy way.
- Get reminded you have a flight in about three weeks. Guess what you can't do with no driver's license and no passport?
- Switch to expedited. Turns out it's the same form, just sent to a different address with more money.
- Try to print out form. Printer is "offline".

The hell it is. It's online, I can see that. Yes, the cable is connected, correctly, both ends. Yes, it prints test pages just fine.
- Put PDF of form on USB stick and print it on Pygment's printer (because one fire at a time, please)
- Spend time f'ing with printer diagnostics. Nothing I do causes the PC to see the printer.
- Decide "OK, time for a clean restart of the PC" (I've already clean power-cycled the printer, twice.)
- Endure half an hour of Windows updates, including at least one panic-inducing restart. At least after the first one it warned me "this process may cause your PC to restart repeatedly." Nice ta know.
- Finally get back into updated PC. Still no printer.
- Angrily plug and unplug printer. Notice I'm not hearing a "ping" like you get when you plug a new device into a Windows box. Hold onto that thought.
- Tell Windows to forget the printer.
- Unplug and re-plug it, several more times. **PRESTO** it works. Not exactly percussive maintenance but the solution seems to be unplug and re-plug enough times.
- Discover that the apparent price of making printer work is that speakers do not work. See above about no sound when plugging in device.
- Check that speakers have power and all cables are correctly attached.
- Spend some time f'ing with the Realtek control panel replacement thing. It doesn't play nice with Windows but it clearly recognizes "you have plugged in a set of speakers" then "you have plugged in a microphone".
- Spend more time head-scratching, then realize that the dumb thing appears to believe that "headphones" and "speakers" are the same thing. Uh, no. Two devices, two cables, two different ports. Why would you even... ?
- Eventually discover that Realtek has updated itself, too, and there's now an "advanced" option. Hidden back there is another dialog and on that dialog is an option that says "treat each input device separately." This is, somehow, not the default. What idiot designed THAT?

Finally sit down at a PC with working speakers, a working printer, and an updated OS. Regret my life choices.

Two hours, still no sign of a driver's license. My life is hilarious.