The Neighbor You Met at the DMV

TAM-WTR.09 · The Waiting Room · The Approximate Mind

Margaret and Donna have coffee every other Thursday. They started during the pandemic, on the phone, when Thursday afternoons had lost their shape and calling someone at a set time gave the week a structure it no longer had. They kept it when the pandemic ended, switching from phone to kitchen table, alternating houses. Margaret’s kitchen one Thursday, Donna’s the next. The coffee is always the same: Margaret makes it too strong and Donna makes it too weak, and neither of them has adjusted in six years, and the consistency of this is part of the joke.

They met at the DMV.

2009. Margaret was renewing her license. Donna was transferring a registration. They were both waiting for Window 4. Margaret’s number was 42. Donna’s was 44. The room was full and the wait was long and there was nothing to do but sit in the plastic chairs and look at the clock with the red second hand and eventually, inevitably, talk to the person sitting next to you.

Donna lived three streets over. Her husband, it turned out, knew Harold from the Rotary Club, or had known him, or had overlapped with him for a year before Harold stopped going. This detail, which could not have been predicted or arranged, which existed only because both women were in the same room at the same time waiting for the same window, produced the first ten minutes of a conversation that has now been going on for seventeen years.

Margaret does not think about the DMV when she thinks about Donna. She thinks about the coffee. But the coffee started at the DMV, in a plastic chair, with nothing to do but wait.

The Accidental Encounter

#

The waiting room’s official function was to manage queue flow while citizens waited for a service. People were there because they had to be. The room was not designed for conversation. The chairs were not arranged to face each other. The lighting was not warm. The experience was not pleasant. Nobody chose to be there for the social opportunity.

And yet.

The unofficial function of the waiting room was what happened while people waited. The conversation with Donna. The young man’s mother who talked to Margaret about the town. The woman transferring her registration who asked if this was a good place to live. None of these were the point. All of them happened because the room created the conditions: shared time, shared space, shared inconvenience, and nothing to do but be in the presence of whoever happened to be there.

The official function has been replaced by a better system. The unofficial function has no replacement, because nobody designed it, and you cannot design an accidental encounter.

This is the hardest thing for institutional planners to hear, because planners plan. They design. They create programs. They allocate space and funding toward intended outcomes. The accidental encounter is, by definition, the thing that cannot be intended. It is the thing that happens in the gap between the institution’s purpose and the institution’s effect, and the gap existed because the institution was inefficient, and the inefficiency created time, and the time created space, and the space created the possibility of Donna.

You can create the conditions in which accidents happen. You cannot create the accident. The distinction is everything.

The Architecture of Accident

#

The institutions that produced accidental encounters shared three features.

They were mandatory or near-mandatory. The DMV, the post office, the bank branch in the era before the app. People went because they had to, which meant the room’s population was not self-selected for interest or affinity or willingness to be social. It was everyone. The cross-section was guaranteed by the obligation.

They required waiting. The wait was the space in which encounters happened. If the DMV had processed everyone instantly, Margaret and Donna would never have spoken. The forty minutes of waiting, which the system treated as a failure, was the condition under which the conversation became possible. The conversation required empty time, and empty time was what the institution, in its inefficiency, reliably provided.

They were spatially concentrated. Everyone was in the same room. Not in a queue that moved, not in a drive-through, not on a phone line. In a room, in chairs, able to see each other, close enough to speak, present in the bodily sense that produces the social reflex of acknowledging the person next to you.

The app eliminated the obligation. The efficiency eliminated the wait. The digital alternative eliminated the room. Each elimination was an improvement by the measures that mattered to the institution. Each elimination also removed one of the three conditions under which Donna became possible.

What Donna Became

#

Donna is not a story about the DMV. Donna is a story about what the DMV produced without knowing it.

They have been meeting for six years, every other Thursday. In those six years Margaret has told Donna things she has not told her daughter, not because her daughter is distant but because her daughter is her daughter, and some things are easier to say to someone who is not your family, who is your friend specifically because neither of you chose the friendship, it chose you, at Window 4, on a Tuesday in 2009.

Donna was the person Margaret called when she found the lump. Not first, not before the doctor, but after the doctor and before anyone else. Donna drove her to the appointment. Donna sat in the waiting room, which had six chairs instead of twelve, and waited, and was there when Margaret came out, and did not ask how it went because Margaret’s face said it was fine, and they went for coffee and talked about Donna’s granddaughter and did not talk about the lump because Margaret did not want to talk about the lump, and Donna knew this because she had been sitting across kitchen tables from Margaret for long enough to know what Margaret’s face said when it did not want to say anything.

The encounter was accidental. The friendship is not. The friendship is the thing that grew in the space the accident created, tended over six years of Thursday coffee, accumulated through the slow, ordinary process of two people showing up for each other at a set time because the set time had become important.

The DMV did not produce this friendship. It produced the condition under which this friendship became possible. The condition was: two strangers, in the same room, with nothing to do. That is all it took. That, and the Rotary Club connection, and the three streets over, and the willingness to say something to the person in the next chair, and the fact that waiting for Window 4 took long enough for something to begin that did not end when the window was reached.

The Donna You Haven’t Met

#

I wonder whether it is possible to design institutions whose primary purpose is the accident, the encounter, the recognition, the Donna you have not met yet, rather than institutions whose primary purpose is the transaction and whose encounters are the byproduct, and whether such institutions would be funded.

The library comes closest. It is a room you can enter for free, without obligation, where the population is unsorted. But the library lacks the mandatory attendance that made the DMV’s cross-section universal, and its population, while diverse, is self-selected for the kind of person who goes to libraries.

The church comes close in a different way. It provides regular gathering, shared time, and a structure that creates space for encounter. But the church sorts by belief, or at least by willingness to be in a room organized around belief, and the sorting limits the cross-section.

The coffee shop is a third-place encounter space, but it sorts by income and preference and neighborhood, and its encounters are between people who have already chosen to be in a space for people like them.

The DMV sorted by nothing. That was its democratic secret. The room held everyone because everyone had the same obligation and nobody had chosen to be there and the sorting happened only after you left.

No one is going to build a public institution whose purpose is to make strangers wait together so they might accidentally become friends. The proposal is absurd on its face. But the thing the proposal would create, the Donna, is not absurd. The Donna is the most important thing that ever happened to Margaret at the DMV, more important than the license, more important than the good photo, more important than any transaction the institution was designed to perform.

Every Other Thursday

#

Margaret has coffee with Donna on Thursday. It is Donna’s kitchen this week. The coffee is too weak. Margaret does not mention this, the way she has not mentioned it in six years.

They talk about Donna’s granddaughter, who is applying to colleges and has a list that is, Donna says, unrealistically ambitious, and Margaret says that is the right kind of list to have. They talk about Margaret’s garden, which needs work after the winter, and Donna offers to help on Saturday, which she has offered before and sometimes follows through on and sometimes does not, and the inconsistency is fine because the offer is the point.

They talk about what they are going to do this summer. Donna wants to see the coast. Margaret says maybe.

They do not talk about the DMV. They have not talked about the DMV in years. The DMV is the origin story of a friendship that no longer needs its origin story, the way a tree no longer needs the seed.

The coffee is every other Thursday and it is not going anywhere. The institution that made it possible is now a website. The plastic chairs are gone. The clock with the red second hand is gone. Window 4 is gone.

Donna is here.

References

#

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, no. 6, 1973, pp. 1360–1380.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. Paragon House, 1989.

Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. Crown, 2018.

Small, Mario Luis. Someone to Talk To. Oxford University Press, 2017.