I recently moved to Chicago from Phoenix. While I’ve kept my car here in Chicago, I don’t need it and I’ve planned on selling it. So I made an appointment at Carmax out in the Chicago suburbs, got up early this morning and drove out there.
They run a title check and find out that the Arizona Department of Transportation has the car listed with 290,000 miles! Umm, the correct mileage from last year should be 29,000.
So, some stupid keypunch error from an overpaid, under worked government ‘employee’ is going to make me register the car in Illinois, pay to put a front license plate bracket on the car, and then turn around and sell it.
Meanwhile, the DMV asshole probably makes more than I do.
One of the back office parts of my job at my brokerage firm is to update the foreign currency exchange rates every night. Yes, this job could be done by a monkey, but I"m constantly reminded to not doze off during it, since a simple keypunch error could cause more problems than fat fingering a trade.
Every big bureaucracy, public or private, can make the occasional mistake.
The really really big pisser is how intractable it can be to get the occasional mistake fixed. Bureaucracies just seem never to have functioning mechanisms in place to correct mistakes, even simple ones.
Think of every horror story you’ve ever read or heard about people getting screwed over by some damned stupid little blunder to typo, however minor. The nightmare is generally not about the mistake itself, but about the impossibility of ever getting it corrected.
I had the DMV make a typo once, but I didn’t complain a bit. I moved from RI to MA when I was 19, and as they were entering my information when I went to transfer my license, they entered my birth year as 1970. It should have been 1976. Strangely, I didn’t report it until two years later…
At least they aren’t going to arrest you and impound your vehicle. One time a person with a very similar license plate ran toll booths over and over again. They keyed it wrong the first time and I got a ticket in the mail from the Toll Road Authority. The info on my car came from the title database and was correct, but it didn’t match the picture from the toll road camera. Called the court and thought I had it cleared up.
But wait, she ran booths again. And apparently they just search a booth runner database with the first part of your plates rather than rekeying it. So, more nasty letters and threats. Called and got it cleared up. But then I got a court summons. Called and got it cleared up. Got a bench warrant for not showing up in court. Got a letter from a judge that that warrent was mistaken. Kept all this info and the booth pictures in a file in my car so I’s have a chance of not getting arrested.
Then the weirdest thing happened. I almost never watch the local news, but one morning at my gf’s house they had a story about a drunk driver who drove through a wall of an apartment building. IT WAS HER! The car matched, I saw enough of the plates to know for sure. I never had any trouble after that and I checked the county website a few days later and my warrant was gone. I think once they caught her they figured things out.
A DMV clerk who was taking my address info orally keypunched “8” rather than “A”.
I did not catch the error until after I got home. I went back the next day, and they
sent me to the head of the line to get their error corrected, which I thought was
decent of them.
