You’re supposed to get a new Driver’s License within 30 days of establishing residency in Washington State. Acts of establishing residency include, but are not limited to, starting a full time job within the state (which I did 52 days ago) and signing a lease or purchasing property (I did the former 63 days ago). Whoops. In fairness, though, I had every good intention of getting my license for the past 35 days. Honest.

One silly thing that new residents from another state have to do, according to the WA DMV website, is retake the written test. I had taken the practice test online somewhere around 35 days ago (you thought I was kidding above?) but I decided to take it again today. The WA DMV had recently redesigned their website to be more usable (read: I couldn’t find a damn thing), but when I found the practice written test, I was amused by the way it had been coded. Here’s a screen shot:

Brief diversion into HTML coding – it turns out that these guys spaced out the answers below the question, and clicking an answer jumps you down the page to the appropriate bookmark. How much space is reasonable to put between answers? Maybe 500, 600 pixels? My new Mac has a pretty high screen resolution, so whatever they chose… it wasn’t enough to hide “A” from me. Helpful on those rare trick questions where A was potentially a right answer… a quick glance down revealed whether A was actually correct.

Not that it mattered at all. I didn’t take the driver’s test today. But more on that in Part 3.