I know I’ve done some dumb things, such as in college, or whatever. But last night I found myself in the position of driving a car with expired tags, registered to someone who is dead (but owned by someone else), with no insurance, and a disabled sign on the license plate (but I am not disabled).
Being a combination of frugal, handy, and determined, my husband was changing our brake pads last night, never having done it before. We only have one car. When one side was done we realized we needed brake fluid to replace the fluid drained out when…blah blah blah…and so I was elected to go get some, in our friend’s car. The friend was helping with the brakes, and he actually has done it before. As I leave, I remember some story about the friend buying the car from a lady who died right after the sale, and how that he did not reregister it in his own name. At the time I didn’t really care, it not being my business and all. This friend is a great guy in many ways, but has trouble sometimes keeping up with the administrative side of being an adult, if you know what I mean. So I casually ask about insurance…no. The tags are November 2007. And, the license plate has a disabled thing on it…at this point I could have said, “No. I’m not driving that car,” but my husband needs to drive our car to work at 4:30 in the morning, and it’s cold outside now and it’s dark (we’re in our well-lit parking space in the back) and he needs to finish the brakes, and the friend is sort of needed for help with the brakes. I could have called friends and asked them to drop whatever they were doing and come over to drive me to get brake fluid at 8 p.m. I could have called a taxi. But we’re fixing our own brakes, so yeah we’re not exactly rich right now. But I didn’t. I just drove to the store in that car. No mishaps or problems. But still. Lots of bad things would have happened, had I gotten pulled over. Worse yet, got in an accident. Pretty dumb.
Don’t tell anybody, but my right rear turn signal has been out for weeks and I haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed yet. It scares the crap out of me that I’m going to get rear-ended, or ticketed, but I still haven’t made time to take it in. Entirely my fault.
Before this thread gets closed, I drove across a parking lot today, from the main company office to our separate office suite… and I didn’t wear my seatbelt.
Look, I’m Canadian. It’s about as rebellious as I ever get. Two minutes, 8 seconds of slow driving without a seatbelt on. (It was pouring rain, and I wanted to sneak half a cigarette, whilst couriering paperwork between our two offices. So I popped into my car for my illicit smoke, then looked at the rain and thought ‘what the heck’ and drove to the other side of the complex, parked, and went inside.)
I got on the Skytrain without paying. Completely accidental - normally I have a monthly pass, so I am used to just walking on, but this month I was away for the first week of January and didn’t get a chance to buy a pass before they were taken from stores. Didn’t even realise I’d done it until I was off the train, transferring to the second one.
I did buy one while I was transferring to the second train, so I didn’t cheat them out of any money, but I would have had a fine if I’d been caught while on that first train. I think it’s $173. Yow!
Last week, I spaced out and sailed across a busy intersection on a red. :eek: I was hungry and concnetrating on the grocery store entrance just past the signal and completely blew the intersection. Luckily, it was fairly late at night and I only cut off one guy who stopped. But it scared the freaking crap out of me and I’ve been very careful every since.
I was buying a crapload of cat food, cat litter and other large items, and after we loaded the car and got home, we realized that the checkout girl missed scanning the cat litter possibly because I had inadvertantly placed it on the bottom rack of the shopping cart and she just missed it.
My tags are expired, I had no proof of insurance (I’m covered, I just didn’t print the proof), and when I got pulled over today (for the first time in my life) the ticket was for my license plate being in the front window instead of on the bumper (my old plates were stolen off the car).
I decided to try to make a hard stop on the motorcycle this morning when a yellow light came up. I had plenty of time to make it through legally, but I misjudged. So when I hit the brakes, I locked up the rear tire. Twice. And by the time I finally got off the brakes for good, I had to sail through the intersection – just after the light had turned red.
I’ve been riding for just over a year. I’m trying really hard to do all the stupid stuff early on without killing myself. So far, so good. :rolleyes:
I walked around the closed gates after the train went by, having very carefully looked both ways, and having conveniently forgotten about the cop car stopped about 50 feet behind me.
Yes, I got ‘pulled over’ and lectured for it. I did my best not to visibly roll my eyes.
You’re lucky. I commute by train daily and cops occasionally stake out our train station watching for people to do just that. The fine is in excess of $200.
I don’t drive, so I have an Arizona state ID. Those never expire, and although there are IDs specifically for “over 21s”, I’m just stubborn enough to keep my old one and make the cashier do the math whenever I buy vodka. I’m also still a student and consequently I’ve had four entirely different mailing addresses in the past year – none of which are the one on my ID. It’s not that big a deal; the address on the ID is my parents’ and in a horrible life-wrecking emergency which rendered me unable to personally tell them where I live that’s who they’d be contacting anyway. But still – they’d probably be annoyed if they noticed.
I’ve been driving with expired tags since October.
I rarely get out, usually only for groceries; the supermarket is too far to walk, especially with a heavy load. I suppose I could walk to the dollar store a few miles down the road every few days and live off chips and old canned meats and veggies. I did it a few times in the beginning. Canned generic spam gets old quick.
We passed inspection no problem, we just can’t afford to get the tags renewed.
Hoping before my next trip I’ll be legal.
Oh yeah…
There’s one more thing but I’m not sayin’.
I exceed the posted speed limit every time I drive; I’ve had a lead foot ever since I first learned to drive. I’ve paid a bunch of money in traffic tickets, too.
I ran a stop sign one morning last week while thinking about an old girlfriend. Lucky for me that it was about 4:00 AM in a residential neighborhood; there were absolutely no other cars to be seen.
