Purgatory is the Florida Department of Drivers' Licenses

Today I made my third attempt to get a Florida driver's license.

Attempt One was aborted because of a long line.

Attempt Two was aborted when I arrived at the DDL (I'm down with the DMV slang, y'all) at 6:50 a.m. (yes, you read that correctly) in a strategic maneuver to outsmart my enemies (aka other people trying to get a driver's license) and found that instead I had been outsmarted by 30 people who were waiting in a line around the block.

Which brings us to Attempt Three. I heard a mythical tale of a DDL office that never has lines. Well of course it was utterly false, but can you blame me for hoping beyond hope that it might be true?

I arrived at the DDL and took a number and sat outside in the overflow "seating" area (really some uncomfortable wooden benches under a tree). Two hours later, number 46 was called and I moved to an indoor seating area. One hour later, number 46 was called again, and this time I was instructed to stand in Line One. Line One crawled along for the next half hour until I finally made it up to the counter. The DDL employee asked me for my number and I replied 46. But he wanted the actual, physical slip of paper I had been holding in sweaty hands and twisting around for three and a half hours before I finally tossed it into my cavernous purse.

I proceeded to rummage through my purse and pull all manners of paper scraps, wallet, cell phone, keys, tampons, lip gloss, etc out of my bag. The others in Line One did not look pleased about the hold up. Number 48, my new friend of the morning, offered to vouch for me as being number 46. I wondered, could tears melt the cold heart of this civil servant? I decided against crying and as I was about to try to reason with him (which may or may not have involved yelling at the top of my lungs about how I hadn't even had a cup of coffee yet), I found the paper.

The rest of the process passed without incident. The sole amusing moment: when I inquired as how to register to vote, the DDL employee directed me a website and then said, under his breath, "Not like your vote will be counted anyway." Nice.

So the point of this story is that I am now a Florida resident ... a day I never dreamed would come.

Law geek moment: The first week of law school, my Civil Procedure class learned that to be a "resident" of a state required several things, one of which is called "intent to remain" -- basically, that you subjectively plan to stay and live in the state where you are located. My friend S (a fellow Tri-State ex-pat) and I used to joke that since we had no intent to ever remain in Florida, we would never be residents. Fast forward three years, and S is a member of the Florida Bar and I'll be sitting for the Florida Bar in July.

But I guess that's the exciting thing about life - you can't ever imagine how it's going to turn out.

Except if you're headed to the Florida DDL -- it'll turn out with a three hour wait.