Woman gets surprise with renewed Tennessee license — a photo of an empty chair
Driver’s licenses across the country are stamped with notoriously poor photos of their owners — none more so now than 25-year-old Jade Dodd’s after the DMV sent her a new license with a picture of an empty chair.
The photo has given new credence to the criticism: “That doesn’t even look like you.”
Dodd shared a picture of her Tennessee license on Facebook on Aug. 5 with all the normal markers of a state-issued ID: name, date of birth, height, eye color — even the little red heart indicative of an organ donor. What it lacked was Dodd, or at least a visual representation of her.
In her stead was a plastic blue chair.
“Currently on hold with the DMV since this is what I got in the mail when I renewed my license...,” Dodd captioned the picture.
The post has since been shared 18,000 times and spawned an onslaught of memes featuring the infamous blue chair at the voting booth, buying beer, behind the wheel of a car and fighting with the Avengers.
“People have been sending me memes that they made and telling me happy late birthday,” Dodd told WKRN. “It’s been weird.”
She also said the Department of Motor Vehicles was skeptical when she first called asking to remedy the situation, the TV station reported.
“The lady at the DMV did not really believe me when I was like ‘hey, I need my license fixed,’” Dodd said, according to WKRN. “Then, she looked it up in the system and goes, ‘oh, I need my manager for this.’”
Wes Moster, spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, confirmed the picture was a clerical error in a statement to McClatchy News.
“When the customer visited the Driver Services Center a few years ago, during the transaction, an examiner made an error by capturing and saving the wrong photo (of an empty chair) to the customer’s profile,” he said. “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.”
Dodd has since been given a license “with her actual photo,” Moster told McClatchy.
The Department of Safety and Homeland Security has also “addressed this situation internally,” he said.
