I thought I’d see what it would take to get a new Alaska driver’s license printed with my updated address, just to make some administrative annoyances easier. (It got updated in the backend system back when we changed PO boxes from Homer to Anchor Point, but the physical license itself still has the Homer address.) So, not knowing quite where to start, I did a web search, and clicked through on a link with a domain of doa.alaska.gov.
“doa“. Huh? Yeah, that’s really what it says. What could that actually mean?
And the problem with that, is that such questions often do have answers. The link loaded, and I learned that apparently the State of Alaska has a Department Of Administration.
I actually checked to see if I’d happened to land at the Babylon Bee, but no, it seems for real:
And so the facepalm giggles commenced, and actually took a while to subside.
Department of Administration. When you’re so tone-deaf to your own acceptance of nonsensical bureaucracy that a name like this gets past every review and committee, and on through legal, out into the wild to confound anyone who might expect names to convey some sort of, you know, meaning. I guess once they get bigger enough there could be a Bureau of Departments (Plural) of Administration, and who knows where it might go from there?
And how’s this for a funny bolt-on…when I first went back to doa.alaska.gov to grab the screencap for this post, I found the site…well, DOA.
(Okay, so it seemed that the entire alaska.gov domain was down at the time–not just doa.alaska.gov–but still, as a lover of irony I found it amusing.)
And once I got to thinking about flashy words conveying no meaning, I of course thought of Weird Al. 🙂
Kevin Wilmeth 