I only planned on writing two posts about my new car. One about the excruciating purchasing process, one about all the stupid bells and whistles that are allegedly for safety, but in reality are just too raise the price and add a panache of tsk-tsk. What else could there possibly be to write about? There can’t be any extra layers of bullshit, can there?
You must not be from California
You see, I have a personalized license plate. Never really seemed like something I’d do. Same teason I don’t have a tattoo. I can’t think of anything so important to me that I’d need it on my skin, or on my car, for all the world to see for the next fifty years.
But five or six years ago, one of the California government’s eternal money grabs spoke out to me.
Plenty of states are running specialty plates these days. Some of them raise money for cancer or whales or, I don’t know, hemorrhoids. If you ask me, the last thing cancer needs is more money. It kills millions of us every year. Why the fuck would I buy it a big-screen t.v.?
What? The money goes to fight cancer? They should make that clearer.
Well, like me, the California government decided they didn’t want the money going to cancer, either. They wanted to keep it all for themselves.
So they came up with fancy new California license plates. That were actually the fancy old California license plates.
Back in ye olden days, California had colorful license plates. Then again, California used to be known for quirk and personality. Beaches and sunsets and roller blading. Now we’re just known for traffic, regulation, and feces on sidewalks.Makes sense that we’d opt for white license plates with boring blue script.
When I grew up, we had blue plates with yellow digits, reflecting our state colors (See: UCLA & Cal Berkely, plus every other Uuniversity of California). Prior to those, we had black plates with gold lettering. I remember those growing up, but they were all faded on old jalopies, most likely a truck being driven by somebody older than dirt.
Evidently before the gold-on-black plates we had black letters on gold. Never saw those, not even the remnants. They’re listed as representing the 1950s, but, growing up in the 1980s, I associated the black plates with the 1950s. Turns out they were mostly from the 1960s, meaning cars last a lot shorter than I expected.
The reason I now know about those gold plates is because, before bringing back the old license plates, they had us vote. They were going to bring back one set of plates (for an additional fee, natch) and one set of plates only. Not sure why, because there’s already about twenty specialty plates out there, but nothing draws up interest like scarcity. And online voting. When sales wane on the winner, they’ll release the next one.
I voted for the blue plates of my youth, but unfortunately that didn’t win. The black ones of the 1960s won because if Boomers do nothing else, they vote, as is evidenced by every presidential election from 2016 through 2024. Since it was an online poll, I thought us Gen Xers had a chance, I shoulda known better. We’ll never get a Gen X president and we won’t get our fancy blue license plates.
Much like sports, once my team was out of the license plate race, I figured I’d tune out of the posteseason. But it turned out that those black plates had some exciting players on their team.
When they started showing up on cars, I was surprised at how sharp the black was. Again, when I was growing up, the only black license plates driving around were sporting twenty years of road rash and grime. More gray than black, and the “gold” digits looked closer to tooth plaque than what one might find in them thar hills.
Unlike those decrepit remnants from 1960, these new plates sparkled like a black hole. Wait, do those sparkle? The pictures NASA has released look nothing like what sci-fi has been promising for a century.
Regardless, when I bought a deep brown car, I thought it totally needed a bright black and gold plate, so I ordered one. Only fifty bucks and maybe if California makes enough money on these plates, they’ll lower some other… ha ha, sorry, I couldn’t even pretend to finish that sentence.
Here’s the strange thing. A personalized license plate also costs fifty bucks. Not fifty additional bucks. For the same price, you can get a specialized plate, a personalized plate, or both. Furthermore, if you bought a no-personalized black plate, you weren’t getting the random seven digits of a normal plate. Instead it was six digits that were in a weird order, such that people would think it was personalized and you’d constantly be responding to people asking, “Okay, I give up, what does HG25LZ mean?”
So I opted for a personalized plate. I realized the scam of the “same price for specialty and personalized plates” a year later. Personalized plates cost that extra fifty bucks every year, as opposed to the one time fee for the black plates. It’s like drug dealers giving you the first hit for free. Or all those alleged houses giving trick-or-treaters cocaine because the kids will totally remember which random house they got that free cocaine at when unloading hundreds of skittles packs. Then they’ll go back to that house with their one or two dollars of allowance. Do I have that right? Makes total sense.
Anyway, after I bought my new car, I wanted to transfer my personalized plates, even if black plates on a black car are so gauche. You take the plates off your old car when you’re trading it in to the dealership and hold onto them until your generic permanent plates show up in the mail. Then you take both sets of plates into the DMV (or, thankfully, AAA) and have them do the swap on their computer.
Seems like a gargantuan waste of time when I could’ve just written my personalized plates down on one of the five hundred forms I had to sign when I bought the car and saved everyone the hassle of producing and sending out a license plate that will never be used. Then again, DMV stands for “Gargantuan Waste of Time,” so no harm, no foul.
Besides, that would require someone at the state to actually read some of the forms I’m signing, and we all know that ain’t happening.
It took about six weeks for my permanent (temporary) plates to arrive. Since I knew I could do AAA instead of the DMV, I didn’t feel the need to take a day off work or anything. Until I showed and was informed that my vanity plates had been reported lost or stolen.
Lost or stolen? What the fuck? I’ve got them right here in my hand. They’ve been riding around in my trunk for six weeks. At no point was it lost, nor was it stolen. “I see that,” the AAA employee said.
Unfortunately, since this was now an issue of potential thievery, the glitch couldn’t get fixed at the interest group level. The polite AAA employee sentenced me to… the DMV… Sans appointment!
When I showed up, the lady at the end of the first line (because there are always multiple lines at the DMV, and you must suffer through the first line to learn which new line you get to go to the end of) asked what I was there for. “Um, these plates are reported as lost or stolen. They’re… not?”
She gave me a ticket starting with the letter G. Probably stood for “Dumbfuck.” Some of the other non-reservation people sitting around me in the next staging area had B tickets and R tickets. It’s a convenient way for nobody to have any clue how long they’re waiting. Now serving B seventy-three. How many tickets away from G thirteen is that?
When I finally made it to the front of the line, the DMV employee wasn’t completely blown away by an alleged license plate thief standing in front of him. While it wasn’t precisely the norm, he claimed it had happened a number of times, and that number was increasing. He’d had one earlier that week. So the good news was he knew what had to be done.
The bad news was that, in DMV parlance, “regular” doesn’t mean “expedited.”
At least they had a form for it.
Okay, it wasn’t a form specifically for missing plates that aren’t missing. Instead it’s a generic “statement of fact.” Unfortunately, my DMV Dude didn’t have that specific form, and when he grabbed one from the sloth next to him, it was in Spanish.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who had to fill it out, and he swore he knew what all the questions were asking and it could be answered in English. So then I just had to stand there and watch him fill out the form. And let me tell you, he wasn’t using shorthand. Ugh.
Then it was on to his supervisor, who needed another twenty minutes or so to sort shit out. Fortunately they at least let me go back and sit down in those super-comfy plastic chairs that feel like they’ve been requisitioned from a local third-grade classroom. Although I had to keep going back up to confirm factoids. Like that the plates were never missing.
I never actually read what they wrote. Didn’t have to sign anything. Probably because the fifth amendment says I don’t have to acknowledge that I stole something that bqelonged to me and never left my possession. That’s what plea deals are for.
But hey, after it was all done, I was able to leave the DMV with plates ready to put on my car!
Not my personalized plates, mind you. I had to put the generic plates on.
The Statement of Fact, I was informed, would take somewhere from three to six weeks for the bureaucratic legal process to work its magic. That three to six weeks was the same timeframe it took to get the generic plates in the mail. Considering that my vanity plates had only showed up as missing three or four days before the generic ones came in the mail, I assume my vanity plates will be legitimized at the same time my generic ones will show up as missing. Can’t wait to explain that one to the cop who pulls me over.
This timing seems suspicious. I figure this is one of two culprits. First option is that the dealership where I traded it in finally resold it or auctioned it for scratch metal. But the timing doesn’t seem right on that. A high-volume dealership has to have that process pretty dialed in. I can’t imagine my 200,000-mile piece of shit sat on a back lot for six weeks only to finally be moved at the exact time I got my new plates.
The most likely culprit, then, is the state of California. Here’s my guess. One level of the bureaucracy believes everybody should get their new plates within a set period of time, say, six weeks, and automatically marks personalized plates that haven’t been swapped back by that time must be “missing.” Another branch of the government, the one that actually produces license plates, takes its sweet time with plenty of days off and eight-hour workdays with six hours of coffee breaks.
Heck, throw in another department that processes the “Statement of Fact” paperwork. Maybe workers from all three departments meet up for happy hour after work (at around 2:30 pm) congratulating each other for the continuous M.C. Escher feedback loop of job security they’ve created amongst themselves.
Normally I’d throw the DMV into this farce, but for once the epitome of government ineptitude actually carrying its weight. They knew exactly what needed to happen and got the ball rolling. At about two miles per hour.
Does my new-found confidence in them mean I expect them to follow through and let me know when all is clear? After writing down my phone number on flimsy piece of scratch paper nowhere near the Spanish form with English writing?
What am I, an idiot?
The Writing Wombat 