FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#660 – News from the Michael Craig Desk, Part VI – Memoirs from the Penalty Box

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Even with these events resolved, Jo Anne still had to pay penance in the form of traffic school and grovelling before the MVD to get her newly-recovered license unsuspended.

The Scottsdale office of the MVD has always seemed to me like a decent place. Yes, it’s the hub of the traffic bureaucracy, but with a desert-resort twist. The building is new and large, with high ceilings, big windows, and lots of light. They can accommodate twenty people at a time and it moves FAST. (As I said before, I was in and out with a new drivers license in less than a half-hour.)

It took Jo Anne more than two hours. Apparently, when you get a number to wait your turn, the letter coded with it is a tip-off to the staff about how fast to work. And if you have a “C” in front of your number, the staff will assume you killed a judge.

Jo Anne has sent about 3 text messages in her life but she sent me more than that many that afternoon to tell me how hundreds of people came and went from the MVD before they called her number. I didn’t hear from her for awhile, so I sent her a message asking if she had finished.

“still in the penalty box”

It eventually worked out, but Jo Anne spent the week learning, it seems, that the world can be an obstacle course of secret penalty boxes. The next night, she picked up dinner from Pei-Wei after dropping Valerie at a dance class. Usually, we order from there before leaving the house but, as is often the case, Jo Anne was planning all this on the fly so she went in and ordered carry-out.

Jo Anne sat down at a bench reserved for people waiting for carry-out orders. First, some guy tried to pick her up. Jo Anne isn’t a flirt and she didn’t take any pride in telling me this story. “He was old and disheveled and he had liquor breath. He was sitting at one end of the bench and I sat at the other, as far away from him as I could. He slid all the way across the bench so he was practically on my lap and started asking me personal questions like where I lived. I gave really unfriendly answers like ‘in a house’ but that didn’t stop him from acting like we were best buddies.”

Liquor Breath was replaced by a pleasant-enough woman who started a conversation with Jo Anne by saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been to three funerals in one week.” That bench, apparently, was a penalty box for people who didn’t have the foresight to order from Pei-Wei in advance.

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