Drove to the nearest testing station, which is a forty-minute drive from here. That was no problem; got there, was almost immediately in a testing lane. That completed, and with the paper in my hand saying the Jeep had passed, I headed for the DMV to get my plates.
Pay attention to that point: with the paper in my hand saying I'd passed.
Because the one testing station in the area is in the middle of craptastic urban sprawl it takes forever to get there--stoplight after stoplight--but of course it's not urban enough that they, I don't know, have four-lane roads or anything, so I got to creep along at 35 in 45 zones almost all the way from there to the DMV.
Went to the plate sticker line, waited, got seen...and was promptly told I needed an emissions test. I pushed forward the piece of paper that certified the Jeep's passage, only to be told that because the computer is down, I can't get a sticker. Oh, the system should be up in an hour.
So I left there, went to the currency exchange, and they told me that they couldn't access the emissions tests, and suggested I go to the DMV. I explained what was wrong with that, then came home in disgust.
This is what I fucking hate, absolutely, about government. They mandate that you do all kinds of things. If you don't do them, you are "out of compliance" and you get punished. And it doesn't matter if you make a good faith effort to comply and cannot DUE TO GOVERNMENT'S FAILINGS.
So, instead of spending the rest of my day relaxing, as I'd intended, I now have to make another trip out to get my plates renewed; and if that fails, I then must go either tomorrow or Friday to renew them--and it'll have to be in the morning before work, meaning I will probably end up being late for work. Where's my compensation for that? Ha! What a jokester I am.
I mean, it's either that, or wait until next Wednesday and risk getting a ticket for driving on an expired license plate. Somehow I don't think the cop or the judge would buy my excuse.
You can bet your ass that if Illinois goes ahead with this "tax by mile" thing one of two things will happen. Either it will be an automatic system like the toll system and never be allowed to fail, or else it will be some craptastic thing were citizens must report mileage by a certain date--and if that's the case, it will be a complete clusterfuck, and the citizens will be penalized when it doesn't work and they can't report.
And it's such a shitty design, too: build a system that requires A, B, and C to be checked, and when any one of those can't be checked, you're fucked. And of course there's no way to manually override it, because "Why would we ever need to do that?" and "You people don't need to be able to do that" and "If we allow that it'll just be abused."
Fuck I hate this shit.
ADDENDUM:
Went back at 4:30, to the currency exchange, which was much more than an hour after I was at the DMV. The system was still not up and I was told to come back tomorrow.
Asshats.