The California DMV is a scary and terrifying place. It’s so bad that their website’s horrific navigation and UI seems comforting in comparison. Both give you the impression that you want to spend as little time dilly-dallying there as possible.
I will say this though – for any given DMV location they have a little box that tells you the wait time if you have an appointment, if you don’t have an appointment, and the wait times for nearby DMV locations. I loosely monitored the wait times at the nearest DMV location throughout the day yesterday. However, this is the sort of thing that feels like a waste of time.1
I was actually tempted just now to build a scraper that would hit their website once a minute, check the wait time, and text me when it drops below a certain threshold. 2 And, if their website decides that’s too often, I would need to find a list of proxies and write a program that would pick a random selection of the proxies and run the scraper through them. 3 Then I remember I wrote something similar about nine months ago and ponder how long it would take me to repurpose that program for this task.
And then I realize I just spent more time daydreaming about defining the problem, thinking of a solution, holes in the solution, and fixing those holes than the amount time I will devote all day tomorrow to hitting F5 to refresh the DMV website.