A brief item:

On Monday, I waited nearly three hours at VF Sports in Port Huron Township to nab two doe tags for the public land areas I hunt during the fall deer seasons in Michigan.

This is one place where I go when I want to make sure to avoid glitches on my tags, i.e., getting the wrong zone, wrong hunt or the sales person hasn't a clue what tag I'm trying to get. Too often at the larger department stores I find they put kids in charge of running the Department of Natural Resources' machine and let's just say it is rarely an automatic transaction.

Well, it was anything but automatic on Monday either. Evidently the new upgraded system the DNR  recently implemented statewide has a few bugs to work out.

The leftover doe tags went on sale at 10 a.m., and by 11:30 a.m., the second person was just getting his tags. Two tags in an hour and a half. Yikes.

It wasn't the store's fault. The sales clerks were just doing what they usually do, but once the item got to the DNR checkout on line, the transaction would cycle endlessly before finally going through after a lengthy delay.

I'm sure many would-be hunters walked away without getting the tags they had hoped to get.

Luckily I didn't have to be anywhere by the time my name was called in the ninth spot at 12:50 p.m.

In past years, I would have been out of there in an hour or less.

-- Mac Arnold