I just got off the phone with the Tx Department of Public Safety in Austin, Tx. We just received a letter dated 01/11/99 to my recently licensed daughter from them. The following is the text of the letter.

The Texas Driver License you recently applied for cannot be issued due to a processing error.

Please present this letter to the driver license office nearest you for assistance in obtaining a corrected issue. There will be no fee for this service.

We regret any inconvenience this delay may cause.

Judy e. Sibert, Manager License Issuance Bureau

Then it gives my daughters DL#, birthdate, exp. date year: 2000, etc.

My daughter turned 16 on 1/4/99 and of course we had to rush right down and get her licensed, she'd have it no other way. Curiosity got the best of me so I picked up the phone this morning and called Austin to find out what the deal was. I was told that over 13,000 people who tried to renew or get their license on the 4th, 5th and 6th of January had also received a letter due to a computer "processing" problem. It seems that data is transferred electronicaly from each licensing office to Austin to be processed. Austin received all the data information except for the photos. This happened at _every_ state license department accross all of Texas.

I questioned the operator a little further and she said that she didn't know what the problem was but that it had been fixed and yes, this was the only time she'd ever seen this happen.

-- Cary Mc from Tx (Caretha@compuserve.com), January 20, 1999

Answers

I'm an Austinite, too - last year I couldn't renew my truck tags over the phone. They were to expire in '99 - clerk kept saying "end of transaction..? Nope, you have to come down in person." I think ALL of Nelda Spears' taxing systems were messed up.

Hey! Today (as we speak, actually) Austin is presenting its Y2K status in the Council Chambers, to be rebroadcast on channel 6.

-- Lisa (lisab@shallc.com), January 20, 1999.