When I was in the Navy 40 years ago, when stationed stateside not in your home state you could let the expiration expire on your auto until you got back there. My Virginia reg and plates were about six months expired when I left Pensacola for Abingdon, just north of the Tennessee border. I figured it would be no problem as it was about five miles to where I was going, the next day was Tuesday so I could get the car inspected and the registration renewed then. There was an on-ramp just north of the border on the Interstate and a state trooper got on just as I passed it. He moves to the #1 lane and starts to pass so I think, “Good; he didn’t notice or doesn’t care,” but no. He got about halfway past my car, drifted back and got back into the #2 lane, so It was no real surprise when the lights came back on. The conversation went something like,
“Do you know why I stopped you?”
“Expired plates.”
He looked in the back seat where my blouse was on top when I’d changed after signing out at the quarterdeck. “You’re in the Navy!”
“Sure am.”
“Where ya been?”
“Pensacola until about ten hours ago; I was there nine months going to school.”
“Where ya headed?”
“My folks’ place in Abingdon, then in five days, Norfolk where I’ll embark for Iceland.”
“Make sure you get caught up before you do.”
“First thing on the list tomorrow morning.”
At the time I was living in Maryland. I owned a vette and refused to wire the front license plate on, Maryland law required front and back plates. Years with the car and no problem with my plates. One day I’m in Washington DC, park on the street and go to watch the Chinese nine man tourney. I come back to my car hours later and I’ve got a ticket for having no front plate. Crazy thing is, in dc you only need the back plate. What gives? Come to find out dc and md have some reciprocating agreement to enforce each other’s car violations. I guess this means all the dc beat cops and meter maids need to learn all the car regulations for two different codes???
There’s a women’s health center across the street from the library. The anti-abortion nutjobs are out there on Saturday mornings, and I enjoy talking to them. One of them got angry with me, smacked my right hand and then spit on me. I started screaming about the “disgusting bitch who assaulted me, a disabled senior citizen,” and how the “cunt” could have damaged my one good hand (all true).
SHE calls the cops to complain about my language. I tell them she is luck I didn’t throw her under the nearest moving bus, as nobody is going to fuck with my only good hand and get away with it. Furthermore, no court in this country would have charged me if I had done so.
They told me to leave her alone, asked me my name and address, didn’t ask for any i.d., and told her to keep her hands off people and do not spit on them, as that is an assault and I could have had her arrested and charged.
If she does it again, I will do so.
I renewed my vehicle registration soon after NC switched to an online system. They didn’t have the bugs out of the system yet, though, and a month later I hadn’t received my sticker.
Fast-forward to my then-girlfriend’s (now wife) graduation from grad school. I’m helping her move up to my town, where she and I are moving in together. Her dad is helping us move; and he’s a great guy, but extremely rules-follower. He’s in the moving van, she and I in separate cars with the rest of the stuff. He keeps moving the van in front of us to keep us at about 5 mph below the speed limit. We’re gritting our teeth.
It is just then that a cop decides it’s a good time to pull me over for an expired registration.
Everything was fine–he could see in his system that I’d renewed–but I watched that moving van continue down the interstate and knew, KNEW, that I was never gonna hear the end of it.
Again.
Am I getting so old that the definition of the word “blind” has changed out from under me?
Well, I don’t know how old you are, but, as was posted earlier in the thread, legal blindness is a spectrum of vision that ranges from “can’t see at all” to “severely enough impaired vision to be called legally blind” where you still have some vision.
My ex-SIL has fibromyalgia that steadily but gradually reduced her vision to complete blindness. But while legally and effectively blind, she did have some amount of vision for a long time before that point, enough that she could even drive a car, at first only during the day, then, before her license was revoked permanently, she could drive during the day as long as she could get a Dr. to certify that her vision was still good enough to drive (during the day).
Did you verify the suspension or just take his word for it because it made you happy?
Heh. It’s a small town. The suspension was the talk of it. The situation remained the big news until the chief was arrested, then all eyes turned that way.
Got stopped once for driving a green car. The officer said a green car with loud pipes (I was much younger then), had hit a stop sign and sped off. Now there wasn’t any damage to my car at all, but the only real description was a green car with loud pipes. I also once got stopped because an officer found a piece of paper with my name on it, in a dump that was only suppose to have stuff that would degrade, and that paper was found by some bricks and it was the bricks that were the problem. I was told I HAD to go get the bricks or I’d be arrested. I held out my hands and told him go ahead arrest me. He mumbled something and said they better not be there later and walked off. The worst one was I got rear ended by a 14 year old unlicensed kid, and I got the ticket, went to fight the ticket and the judge told me he didn’t know how I was going to as as he was a witness. I tried to file a complaint but none of the lawyers would even touch it as they had to have cases before the judge. All that and many other problems happened in one small Kansas town, it has been long my goal to hit lottery for some huge amount of money just so I could tear that stupid town down. And yes i hold grudges for a LONG time.
During my goth phase, I would go to a local goth club wearing short skirts, fishnets, corsets, revealing tops, etc. I dressed slutty goth. Well, I was getting ready at a friends house and I locked my keys in my car. I called my dad and waited for him to bring my spare keys so I could get in my car. So there I was, standing on the corner, all slutty dressed, in a not-great neighborhood. Then my dad pulls up and I lean over into his car window to get my keys. An unmarked car pulls up behind my dad and flips the lights on. (I think they had been watching me from a near by parking lot.)
I had to explain that I was going clubbing and that I had locked my keys in my car and my dad was just bringing me my keys. One of them followed me to my car where I unlocked it, produced my original keys, and brought the spares to my dad. Meanwhile, my dad was showing his ID and my little sister (who was sitting in the front seat) was backing up our story. The cop checked my ID (last names matched) and our story seemed to check out.
Lol at first I was going to ask you if this might be NYC’s MTA, but your use of the word “tram” leads me to believe otherwise.
Funny story though.
Sorry to have misled you. At age 14 I had a traumatic head injury and a high fever, which was high enough to damage my optic nerves. Now my uncorrected visual acuity falls below the threshold for being considered “legally blind”. With glasses, I can just barely qualify for a driver’s license. But saying that kind of interrupts the flow of the story. I was hoping from the context that that particular meaning was fairly clear.