The Department of Motor Vehicles.

I never, ever refer to the DMV by its full name, but I realized while typing that title that it is tremendously effective in conveying the sheer Brazil-like nature of that particular government office.
"Go in the middle of the afternoon," my friend K assured me. "That's what I did last time I had to renew my license and I was in and out of there in no time."
I also had to renew my vehicle tags, so I set out much earlier than I would normally do on a friday afternoon. The tag office was a snap. It took me longer to park my car and walk through the metal detector than it did to get my new stickers. You can't really appreciate that unless you have lived in a large city and waited in two lines for over an hour, only to be told yet again that you are in the wrong line, year after year until you finally, in an act of subconscious desperation, leave the keys in the ignition of your aging and decrepit rust-encrusted auto, and park it under the El tracks where it gets stolen, thereby saving your life, trimming your waistline, and restoring your sanity. Having had these experiences, I appreciated the tag office experience immensely. So much so that I may have frightened the middle-aged woman behind the counter and the fat security guard with my enthusiastic-bordering-on-psychotic grin and over-loud "Have a great day!!" as I blew through the doors of the courthouse and out into the horrific storm (a tornado watch, no less).
I was prepared for the worst.
It had stopped raining by the time I got there. The parking lot was pretty packed. I entered the front door and saw to my utter joy that there were currently only two people in the first line. And there were only a handful of people sitting in the waiting area. I was puzzled by this until I read the giant sign on the back wall indicating that no driving tests were given in the rain. Sweet.
I got to the front of the line and one of the women who works there came up to the older lady in front and explained that someone would be over in a minute to distrubute numbers to those of us in the first line. (Numbers that would then be called to move us into other lines, based on our individual needs--oh, the efficiency!! I became suddenly wildly optimistic. This was not the DMV I remembered from five years ago.) A few people walked in behind me. About a minute and a half passed before the second woman in line, who had been talking to her teenaged son and had not heard our instructions, turned to the first woman and asked what was going on.
"I don't know," she said, "She said there would be somebody here in a minute to give us numbers but there isn't anybody here." Obviously a literalist. They began discussing their general confusion. I began ignoring them and instead turned my attention to the guy at the first window who was trying to get his license back.
"So I got like, four tickets in a coupla months," he said very loudly. "If I take like, a defensive driving course or somethin' can I get like a couple points off that?"
The woman behind the counter looked weary. She also looked like she wanted reach over the counter and slap the shit out of him, but instead she answered "Yes" very stiffly and stared at her computer screen. This guy was about fifty pounds overweight, dressed in a rumpled pair of Dockers and an even more rumpled polo shirt. He was probably about thirty, but he looked a lot older. He continued his ill-advised blathering.
"Yeah, I drive for work all the time, and I'm not really paying attention, and I never wear my seatbelt, and of course I usually speed..."
My jaw was dropping a little lower with every word he spoke. The woman behind the counter looked up at him, and then, in an almost Ferris Bueller-like fashion, looked directly into my eyes, in a split second conveying both her desire to throttle him and her knowledge that this would be completely futile, because after I helped her bury the body there would be a whole line of similar nitwits waiting at her window when she returned. She looked back at him.
"You're all set."
"I can go then?"
"Yes sir," was her verbal response. You fucking useless waste of natural resources the implied end to that statement, clear as day on her face, which he wasn't looking at. He smiled and nodded at me as he walked outside, presumably to get on his cell phone while speeding through a school zone.
I was laughing and looking around for anyone else who may have been privy to the same conversation. They were still worrying about whether or not the promised paper numbers would actually materialize. They did. I had to bump up my weight on my new license by about ten pounds and change my address, but other than that my visit was incredibly uneventful. Which is exactly how I like it.