Everyone has seen a DMV custom plate, but how about a driver’s license?
A trip to the DMV can be a tiresome experience as it usually involves long hours of waiting in line. You’d think after all that effort, you’d get a decent picture on your license, but you’re wrong – driver’s license photos always turn out to be one of our most unflattering photos! We never look good in them for some inexplicable reason, no matter how nice we think we look before they were taken.
For this Tennessee woman, however, her experience with the DMV is a lot different. She didn’t look bad in her photo like most of us – that’s because she wasn’t even in it! The hilarious clerical error had Jade Dodd and her family laughing.
“I was with my Mom and we were going to eat lunch, and I said, ‘You need to see this. This isn’t right,’” she told WKRN.
Jade recently renewed her license online, and when her ID came in the mail, she was surprised to discover that it didn’t have her photo on it. Instead of her picture ID, there was an empty blue chair.
When she told a clerk from the DMV about it, she was skeptical at first.
“The lady at the DMV did not really believe me when I was like, ‘Hey, I need my license fixed,’” she recalled. “Then, she looked it up in the system and goes, ‘Oh, I need my manager for this.’”
Jade said her coworkers are thoroughly enjoying the snafu.
“My boss thinks it’s funnier than anyone. I was at work Friday, and he pointed to a chair outside of his office door and was like, ‘I thought this was you. I waved at it this morning!’ And I was like, ‘Thanks,’” she said.
And he’s not the only one making jokes about it. Jade shared a photo of her driver’s license on Facebook, and it immediately blew up.
“Currently on hold with the dmv since this is what I got in the mail when I renewed my license….” she captioned the post.
So far, it has been shared over 19,000 times since she posted it on August 6.
“People have been sending me memes that they made and telling me happy late birthday,” she explained. “It’s been weird.”
One of the memes made about Jade’s driver’s license
The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security had a solid explanation about the error.
“When the customer visited the Driver Services Center a few years ago, during the transaction, an examiner made an error by capturing and saving the wrong photo (of an empty chair) to the customer’s profile,” Wes Moster, the department’s director of communications, said in a statement. “When the customer recently renewed her driver’s license online, she received an image of a chair because that was the last picture taken on file. When the Department was made aware of her situation, we immediately made things right with the customer and provided her with a license with her actual photo and have addressed this situation internally.”
They said it’s the first time that a mistake like this has happened.
Jade isn’t upset about it at all. In fact, she thinks the whole ordeal was a welcome distraction from everything negative that’s been going on because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A colleague of hers gave her tips about what she can do with the ID showing an empty chair.
“One of my coworkers was like, ‘Keep it in a picture frame. You can use it as a wall decoration, and it’s a conversation starter when you have dinner,’” she said.
Jade received her new license—now with her photo on it—on Monday.
Share this story with your family and friends – they surely need a good laugh these hard times!