Today, I found a handy and surprisingly high-tech feature, especially for the Washington State Department Licensing Web site.

When you click on one of the office locations, you can find out how long the wait is for both renewing a driver's license and for getting a first-time license.

For instance, at the time I was writing this, the downtown Seattle office had a 27- minute wait for renewals and no wait at all for first-time licenses. At the Rainier office a few miles south, it was the reverse. There was no wait for renewals and a 23-minute wait for first-time licenses.

To be even more high-tech, I figured I'd email the URL to myself so I could check the status of the lines tomorrow morning before leaving the house. Depending on the lines, I'd either head north to downtown or south to Rainier.

Unfortunately, when testing this theory, I found that the site doesn't support BlackBerry; I encountered an error when the page was loading.

So close, yet so far away.