This whole experience has been absolutely mind blowing. First tho, people here are more helpful and less rabid than some other locations and by and large are pretty chill, more than I could keep it together in this situation. They're stuck in the middle of this Orwellian nightmare with me. I've been trying to get a California driver's license for 8 years. I have a perfect driving record. I have never failed a test. The documents they decide they want to reject rotates. At first, they were rejecting my social security card. When they were rejecting that, they didn't say, oh, by the way, your birth certificate and residency documents also aren't good enough. Getting a new social security card took years. The government uses a third party identity provider that just does not work. It sends you in login circles, where after doing 2FA auth it wants you to log in again then makes you do 2FA auth again, forever, or else it's trying to make me confirm info on some credit report that is not accurate but I don't know which of the three so getting it fixed is a whole other nightmare. Finally, finally I got a new social security card... then they decided that my official copy of my birth certificate wasn't "original". I showed up with the o-riginal birth certificate signed by the doctor, with my baby feet stamped on it, and the seal of the small midwestern town I was born in the form of an embossed gold state seal sticker on it, on elaborate, finely printed paper, with my and my mother's hospital bands. They looked me in the eye and said "we need the original". I've been running around showing this to people and telling them what happened and people are offering to go in to the DMV with me to see this with their own eyes or do unrepeatable things to try to fix this. This is an abbreviated story; in my 20 or 30 visits, I wore out a birth certificate that had the seal embossed in to the birth certificate because passing it through the slot in the window so many times made it fall apart at the edge of the seal. They liked that one. Credit card statements were rejected as proof of identity because they wanted a lease, but I was casually paying rent to a family friend. Over and over, a document accepted once won't be accepted the next time. Trying to show them a pile of three official birth certificates just made it worse than guessing which one they might accept and showing them that. And I'm not being a jerk here... again, I realize they're trapped in this hellscape with me. When they say they can't take my documents, I say thank you, about-face, and march out (which is what my friends want to help fix). During this eight year saga, my previous driver's license expired, then my passport expired. In the social-security-birth-certificate-two-proofs-of-address shuffle, they don't ask for that, but later on, they do, so having had (past tense) a whole passport with Iceland, France, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands stamped in it didn't help at all establishing that I am me. Getting back in to this country is easier than getting in to California. The latest birth certificate added a year to this saga too. This small Midwestern state requires their document be notarized; California Notary Publics aren't allowed by law to notarize documents from other states. Instead, they have to notarize a separate piece of paper affirming that they've checked my ID and signature and I appear to be who I say I am, then they may staple that to the other document. So in the estimated 30 days of my life the CA DMV has drained from me, visiting an old granite courthouse planted among the cornfields is part of the tally... not forgetting that my actual original birth certificate from the hospital with my stupid baby feet on it isn't good enough. In all of this, the DMV keep asking if I want a real ID. I say not if there's any chance that it's going to cause any problems. Becoming cynical that I would ever manage identity documents for this state, I also started saying over and over that I don't need a driver's license if there's any chance it will cause any problems. Just give me an ID. In El Cerrito, I was riding my bike to the DMV, or walking over (bit longer walk but the Ohlone Greenway is fantastic). Now I'm about as far as you can be from a DMV as possible, and I still do not have a car, tho I had an out of state driver's license, and I kept saying "if a driver's license might possibly cause any problems, I don't want it, I just want an ID". This was apparently ignored. The previous time I was in, I spent about 4 hours there waiting in various lines, then it turns out that I had to take a written test to get the driver's license, but then it was too late in the day to the test, so I had to come back. Argh. Came back today. Wait in three different lines, again. Take the test. They tell me that I have to schedule a behind-the-wheel driver's test. What part of "if a driver's license will cause any problems, I don't want it?" wasn't clear? read more