Yes, Sidney Crosby Should Get To Skip The DMV Line

Sidney Crosby renewed his driver's license at the DMV this week. Unlike all of the rest of us, he didn't have to wait, thanks to Pennsylvania state policy. GET ANGRY (or don't because this policy actually makes sense).

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette actually has almost 800 words on Crosby's trip, including, hilariously, official confirmation from the Penguins that Crosby renewed his license on Friday, and, stupidly, an implicit contrast of Crosby skipping the line with Wayne Gretzky taking a moment while signing autographs to talk to a child, because everything Sidney Crosby does must be considered in the context of Wayne Gretzky.

While all this is presumably meant to blow the roof off of the most important story happening in Pittsburgh until the Steelers' next preseason game, it also explains that the purpose of the Pennsylvania policy allowing DMV supervisors to use their discretion in allowing prominent people to cut the line is to maintain sanity and order at the DMV.

Sorry, Susan Campbell of Cranberry ("He should have to sit and wait with everybody else"): Allowing the famous, especially celebrities as prone to Twitter-fueled mobbing as Crosby is in a Pittsburgh suburb, to conduct their business at the DMV in an efficient manner will add maybe a couple of minutes to your wait. Allowing fans and the public to mob those celebs threatens to choke up the DMV, add more time spent in line to every patron's day, and produce much bigger headaches for workers. This is policy that exists not because Crosby is special, but because the general public ain't shit, and can't be reasonably expected to let celebrities be normal people, as Campbell's own daughter ("If I knew he was going to be there, I'd be down there in five minutes") proves.

And if you're not special, and envious of the special treatment here? Become special. Crosby did it, because he's not like everyone else.

Of course, as long as Crosby had a Pennsylvania address on his existing license, he could have averted all of this by renewing online, a service also available to the whiners and poor planners among the unwashed masses.

[ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP