To Err Is Human.....

To really screw things up requires a government agency.

On Saturday I received an official-looking letter in the mail. It was one of those envelopes with the carbon paper inside so the letter can be typed right thru the envelope, the things that businesses stopped using thirty or so years ago. At first I thought I'd been called for jury duty. It turned out to be a Failure-To-Appear notice on a parking ticket for a Fairly Small Town (FST for short) in New Jersey I don't think I've ever been to.

At this point I must offer a little aside. I work for a consulting company that processes parking tickets for a Very Big Municipality (VBM). I've worked there for nine years. VBM processes more parking tickets in one day than most NJ towns will see in a year. I can quote to you, from memory, the various ways a ticket can move thru our system, from issuance to payment, or judgment, or collection proceedings, or towing your car and auctioning it off, or hearings, or automatic dismissal, etc etc. I've forgotten more about parking tickets than most people will ever know.

So anyway, FST promises me dire consequences should I fail to pay the amount shown, those consequences including suspension of driving privileges, inability to register my vehicle, additional penalties added to the ticket, arrest, and being tied to a chair and forced to listen to Barry Manilow. They provide me with a web site where I can look at details of the ticket, and a phone number I can call on Mondays thru Fridays between the hours of 9 am and 4 pm. Being the technically savvy person I am, I fired up my home computer and checked out the web site. Hmmm, confusion, the ticket in question was left on the windshield of a Chevy. A quick look in the driveway confirms that the vehicle out there is a Jeep Liberty. It was such when purchased in 2006, it is now, one assumes it's always been a Jeep Liberty. Therefore, whoever wrote the ticket got the license plate wrong and, co-incidentally, wrote down my plate by mistake.

I need to make another little aside here, explaining via my vast store-house of information on how parking tickets are processed. The police officer, traffic-control officer, or whoever, who leaves a ticket on your windshield doesn't know who you are. He or she sees your car parked illegally and writes the ticket, keeping a copy for the official record. If you don't pay the ticket the town will contact the state Department of Motor Vehicles to find out (via your license plate) who owns the offending car, they then mail you a nasty letter telling you to pay your fine or Suffer The Consequences.

So, this is obviously not my car, I am not responsible for this ticket, and I can in good conscience plead not-guilty. First thing this morning (Monday) I call the supplied number, push a couple of buttons, and, surprise surprise, get a real live person on the phone. I tell her my plight and she tells me she needs to contact DMV for information on my car and to call back Wednesday (tomorrow being January 1, thus a holiday).

*blink blink*

I can go two possible ways at this point. I can call upon my extensive knowledge of the processing of parking tickets, point out that DMV has already been contacted (that's how they knew who to send the letter to), that if their system was at all sensible they'd have gotten my vehicle information at the same time as my personal information (more efficient since DMV charges for these contacts, so why contact them twice instead of once?), and that the ticket could and should be dismissed right now.

I'll call back on Wednesday.