Beware the DMV giant
| July 24, 2009 | 3:07 PM
More journal entries from Hank Schultz »
This is a tale of two numbers, two titles, a dyslexic tow truck driver and one big mess.
Have you ever looked at the vehicle identification number on your car? It’s a seemingly nonsensical jumble of numbers and letters. I’m a little number-dyslexic myself, and I always have to read those things two or three times to make sure I’ve got them right. Apparently the tow truck driver who once towed the car that I helped my daughter buy has the same trouble.
He transposed two numbers in the last six digits and thereby aroused the sleeping giant of the state motor vehicle bureaucracy. The title should have read “45,” but the document issued when this car was taken from the nursing-home parking lot where it was abandoned reads “54.”
Small issue you say? Think again. These last six digits are, I’ve come to find, the sacred ground of VIN numbers. Woe be to any who transgress.
The way in which this tiny mistake utterly dumbfounded the clerk who tried to help me at the motor vehicles office in Lakewood was comical. I’ve edited copy for years, and when I came across a small error like this, I just fixed it and moved on. But the DMV doesn’t work that way.
“I’ve got the car out in the parking lot,” I tell them. “Can’t we just go look at it?”
But hard facts — facts such as, yes, this is the vehicle described on the title you have in your hand, whatever the precise order of the last six digits might say — are less important than the paper trail and that all-important string of numbers.
They did a search and found the old title with the correct VIN number, issued to the previous owner who, one assumes, passed away recently. And I had the new title, the one with the slightly jumbled VIN number, issued to the mother of the young man who reconditioned the vehicle. The existence of these two documents would be easy for most people to understand and explain. But it’s a hurdle of Himalayan proportions for the DMV.
I mean no disrespect to the friendly folks at the DMV, who, after all, are just trying to do their jobs. But their Pythagorean reverence for the numbers and their specific relationship to each other is hard to defend. These documents aren’t an end in themselves; they are meant to describe an actual object. In this case, it’s a 1998 blue Toyota. There is no dispute about which car we’re talking about. Can’t we just reconcile the two and get on with it?
There is a way to do this, it turns out. But it leads through the long, dusty corridors of a bureaucratic labyrinth. It’s time-consuming and expensive. I may have to buy a bond guaranteeing that what anyone can see for himself is, in fact, true. Yep, that’s the 1998 blue Toyota in question. To verify that might end up costing me hundreds of dollars.
As I said, I used to work as a copy editor. If only I’d had a gig like the one they’ve got going on at the DMV. If I could have gotten paid hundreds of dollars for fixing each number transposition, each misspelling, each missing apostrophe I’ve come across over the years, I’d be writing this from my own tropical island instead of a downtown coffee shop.
bureaucracy, government, motor vehicles
