Miracle on Carling Street

When I was back in Canada, I took the opportunity to renew my drivers license. My license had actually expired back in April, but the phone people at the licensing bureau couldn't figure out how to let me renew by distance. The Foreign Service does have an agreement with the Bureau to allow interim long-distance renewal, but clearly the policy is not widely disseminated to staff. In any case, I set aside a few hours during my time in Canada to head over to one of the offices to take care of this adminstrative piece of business. Imagine my intense surprise when the entire process took NINE minutes -- five minutes of waiting in line and four minutes to take my photo and process the renewal. I was floored! Now, I realise that these things are not always so fast in Canada and there have definitely been occasions on which I have walked out of the licensing bureau because of ridicously long queues and processing times [I try not to let my glasses get too rosy!]. However, I suspect that this time around Canada was trying to taunt me with this display of über-efficiency. After adjusting myself to standard wait times in Brazil -- accreditation documents [2 months]; personal identity number [4 months]; diplomatic car purchase [4-9 months]; delivery of air and/or sea shipments [3-4 months]; purchase and delivery of home appliances [22 days]; installation of phone line [21 days -- a tremendous improvement over the until recently two year delay!] -- I could not believe that I had been in and out of the license bureau in ten minutes! Happily enough, this left quite a lot of extra time to get some other errands in, including a food run to pick up products greatly missed by us Canadians.