License plate — Blog

Respect the trades

I recently bought a 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI. With it I was thinking about finally trying my hands at a vanity license plate. In my previous cars I’ve been too cheap to pay the $45 per year extra on top of the existing licensing fee for the privilege. Now that I’m as financially secure as I’ve ever been, the timing feels right.

That is, until I received the randomly assigned standard plates from the California DMV: 9VWB456. Doesn’t get more serendipitous than that, right? When the god of random chance assigned me plates with letters VW - historical short form for Volkswagen, there is no way I can get a vanity plate now. It’s too perfect.

I don’t believe in any gods, but I can see why people reaffirm their faith when stuff like this happens to them. I too would explain it with a higher power looking benevolently upon me.

Part of the process of buying a used vehicle, I took the GTI to get new tires. The existing tires cannot be trusted. The local America’s Tire has a window looking into the work bays at the waiting area. So the whole time I was watching the endless toil the grease monkeys (I use this term with all love and respect) are going through. A typical wheel plus tire is easily over 50 pounds, and these guys are heaving and huffing them onto waist-high machines. Good exercise if you’re in a gym, horrible if you have to keep doing that for an entire workday.

Never mind all the cancerous fumes from the tires and vechicular particles.

People have said that the trades are a good alternative to attending university. It can absolutely be, but one has to go in while understanding the tradeoffs. The trades are incredibly physically demanding. I don’t suppose it’s possible to be a car mechanic and coming out the other end without some sort of chronic pain. There’s good money to be made, but you’d better religiously save for a future that might not be so rosy health-wise.

As person who gets paid well to work in a sterile office cubicle, I would say a college education that parlays to a white-collar job should still be the number one option.

Adventures at the DMV

No one enjoys going to the DMV ever, but sometimes you must do so in order to keep your motor vehicle on the road legally. Yesterday morning was such an occasion, as I went with my dad to the local office to get replacement license plates. Someone saw the shiny new 2021 registration sticker on his Hyundai Tucson and thought it would be nice to steal the rear plate that it’s stuck to. Not wanting to drive for very long without a rear license plate on the car, a trip to the DMV was begrudgingly called for.

This may be the times of COVID, but some things don’t ever change, such as the long queue for the DMV in the morning, well before the doors open. Of course, the line is socially-distanced, so it stretched well onto the adjacent sidewalk and out into the residential area. We arrived half an hour before the office opens at 8:00AM, and the wait time ultimately came to about two hours, which is not all that different from “normal times”, if you’re so unprepared as to not have an appointment.

Appointments aren’t possible at the moment except for driving tests.

In these not so normal times, you get your temperature taken and answer a few questions as to the condition of your health vis a vis the coronavirus. Once the building reaches a capacity deemed safe, they take down your phone number and asks you to wait inside your vehicle - you’ll get a text when your number is called and ready to be served. Other than the unusual waiting and screening situation, the procedure at the DMV is not all that different: you’ll spend most of the time waiting, while the thing you’ve come to the office for takes less than five minutes (driving tests notwithstanding).

Excluding the wait, we were in and out of the premises in no time with newly issued metal plates. Fingers crossed these survive long enough to last a calendar year!