In all my years of ID renewals and standing unsmiling in front of DMV cameras, I’ve never ended up with a good driver’s license photo.
It doesn’t matter how long I spend preparing in front of the mirror the day of the shoot — I always end up looking like an unkempt felon who just found out they’ve been denied parole for the fourth time.
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But while my own history with ID photos is rather disappointing and largely tragic in nature, I can at least feel happy knowing I have one thing over this woman from Tennessee: my driver’s license doesn’t include a bizarre chair picture instead of my face.
That’s exactly what Jade Dodd of Hickman County ended up with when she had her license renewed online.
A viral photo posted to her Facebook page on August 5 revealed the hilarious error. There on her card, right in the little square where her face belonged, was a single, empty chair.
“Currently on hold with the [DMV] since this is what I got in the mail when I renewed my license….” Dodd captioned the post, which currently has over 8,000 reactions and nearly 20,000 shares as of writing.
Understandably, after she opened up her mail to find the ID card for an office chair, Dodd set out to try and remedy the goof.
“The lady at the DMV did not really believe me when I was like ‘hey, I need my license fixed,'” she recalled to WKRN . “Then, she looked it up in the system and goes, ‘Oh, I need my manager for this.'”
As it turns out, the whole hilarious mix-up was thanks to a simple clerical error.
“When the customer recently renewed her driver license online, she received an image of a chair because that was the last picture taken on file,” Wes Moster, director of communications at the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, said in a statement to CNN .
“When the Department was made aware of her situation, we immediately made things right with the customer and provided her with a license with her actual photo and have addressed this situation internally.”
Fortunately, Dodd has been able to find the humor in the situation, and said it’s certainly helped brighten things up, especially considering the ongoing pandemic.
“My boss thinks it’s funnier than anyone,” she told WKRN. “I was at work Friday and he pointed to a chair outside of his office door and was like, ‘I thought this was you, I waved at it this morning’ and I was like ‘thanks.'”
Dodd has since received her new correct license, but there’s been no word yet as to whether the chair got it’s right card as well.
Assuming, of course, it ended up with Dodd’s photo on its license. Classic mix-up.
