>>>>>UPDATE<<<< Thanks to my Facebook friend Ruth Hendrix for providing this link. Check the web cams at the inspection to see how busy they are…. Thanks, Ruth. <<<<>>>>

Maybe I am just a grumpy old wimp, but 78 minutes seems like a lot of time out of my life to get the mandatory car inspection, just to be able to renew my vehicle registration, which is probably more expensive here than anywhere else in Tennessee because, in addition to the normal registration fee of $24 + a $2 EDP fee, we get to pay a wheel tax of $50 (It is my understanding that this was a temporary tax about 30 years ago, but it just never got cancelled.) + a $30 municipal fee (which, one must assume, pays the expenses of the highly efficient inspection stations plus adds a few bucks to the City’s coffers). {My English professors used to call that a run-on sentence, I think}   So the rest of the state pays $26/year for car registration renewal, but we Memphians pay $106 – more if you do your transaction by mail and/or use a credit card.  Oh, and did I mention that it’s only Memphians that have to have the inspection and pay more.  You can get cheap registration, with no inspection, and drive your smoking, missing brake light, no windshield wiper junker in from Germantown to your job in Memphis every day with impunity.

I probably would not be on this rant if I could have gotten through vehicle inspection in a reasonable amount of time.  In years past, the wait was never very long, but over the past few months I have heard reports of waits of well over an hour for the inspection.  Mayor Wharton, a quality of life kind of guy, even extended the hours of the inspections to lessen the misery.  When it was my time to go I took along my Flip camera.

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”with apologies to the Indigo Girls”]I spent four years 78 minutes prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free.[/stextbox]