Your Friendly Neighborhood Insta-Honkers. A UAE Driver's Tale
Have you heard of Insta-Honkers?!
Insta-Honkers, as defined by Emirati vlogger Khalid Al Ameri are your fellow drivers on the road who love to remind you of the traffic light that has just turned green. 🚦They are paying close attention to the lights and deem it upon themselves to let you know.
To do this, they honk their horns to alert you that, "Hey! Gooo!".
It is so irritating expecially that sometimes your insta-honker is a car 4-5 cars behind you.
Hello?!
I encounter them on the road almost all the time but I did not expect to come across one while on queue at the vehicle inspection centre.
It's the time of the year when I need to renew my car registration. Each car renewing from 3rd year needs to pass vehicle inspection first before the the registration can be renewed.
I was patiently waiting for my turn-- or at least I was trying. I have already set my expectation since last year, I stayed there for almost 3 hours. To pass time, I was trying to create a steemit post.
Suddenly...
BEEP! BEEP!
There! My Insta-Honker!
Whoah! I thought nobody was behind me. Even though, the car in front of me had just started moving and this lady behind was kind enough to give me a nudge.
Thank you very much! (Can you note the sarcasm?)
On his video linked below, Khalid Al Ameri shared his thoughts about driving in the UAE and touched up on these Insta-Honkers and humorously justified different driving behaviors in the UAE.
It can actually make you go, "Hmmm, yeah..." and I just try to remember his video whenever I get pissed off on the road.
Back to my car registration renewal...
Did I mention already that I am a big procastrinator? Oh well, something about me and last-minutes.... hehe.
Today, the 12th of June is the last day of my 1 month grace period to finish the registration without incurring any fines. Partly, I also tried to maximize my car insurance (valid for 13 months) so while my car registration expired last May 12, my car insurance expires today. I renewed the insurance yesterday, so practically I just maxed out what I paid for last year. Do I make sense?! 😅
After the vehicle inspection (which for me took an agonizing 2 hours) one can basically renew the registration through one of these machines or through the UAE Ministry of Interior mobile app. This process should just take a couple of minutes, or so if you need to pay for traffic fines (I had 1 parking violation).
Well, tonight, not for me.
For some reason, my Emirates ID ( national ID card) could not be reconized by the machine! I checked the app and same thing!
Darn it! The security guard said I had to go to another building to request for my ID details to be updated, but then they would only re-open at 9:00pm. It was only 8pm at that time. There was nothing else I could do but wait.
Finally at 9:00pm, the office opened and boy, oh boy! The entrance was swarmed by a flock of men! I did not realize that a lot were waiting and that it would still be busy at this time. Of 50 men, I think there were only 5 of us women.
Fortunately, they prioritised us and I was done in a few minutes. Well... the updating of ID.
I was still asked to go back to the machine and complete the proces there!
And boy oh boy again! If you saw at the picture above the machines were idle, this time there was a long queue on each one.. Well, only 4 machines (4 from the right) were working. 😯
I finished at exactly 10:00pm, four tedious hours. If my mobile did not die on me I could have tried to renew through the app.. but I had to make sure it' done so...
My head was throbbing and I could not wait to go home and see my kids.
Thankful that finally I got this renewal out of the way... Finally.
Cheers to more renewals.! Lol
All photos are mine, taken via Samsung Galaxy Note 3
@arrliinn You have earned a random upvote from @botreporter & @bycoleman because this post did not use any bidbots.