Monday, July 21, 2003

Part of my morning routine is checking the mail while Mel and I do our little lap around the neighborhood. This morning I received a letter from the Arizona Dept. of Transportation.

A few weeks ago it came time to renew the tags for my car, and like a good little netizen, I jumped online and took care of it immediately (I also took care of Jamie and registered her to vote). One of the options in renewing your tags was to get "vanity" plates for your auto. There's a lot more folks out in Arizona with vanity plates than what you see in Texas, and I discovered that these personalized plates are fairly inexpensive. So, without thinking clearly, I popped in my personalized info. and sat back to reap the benefits of high-speed bandwidth and a check card.

At 5:30 this morning, I got Saturday's mail. Despite the fact I filled in the little box on the form explaining what I had chosen for my plate to say, someone in the ADOT doesn't believe I had the best of intentions when putting "Krypto" on the back of my car. I don't know what they THINK it means, but it's pretty clear that "Krypto" was kind of freaking them out.

Instead of a performing a 30 second web-search to verify my claim, this government monkey sent my request to some review board. No time line has been given as to when I can expect to see whether or not "Krypto" has been approved, but the letter insinuated that the word or phrase had connotations which the state of Arizona did not like.

The thing which concerns me is that I have a tag which I must put on my car by the end of the month. This tag set me back no small amount of green, and I don't want to have to buy a new one if and when they do send me my plate. Lousy bastards.

I won't cry if the state won't allow me to put this on my car (although I think I will be vindicated). In fact, the decision to put Krypto on my car was one I kind of questioned about five minutes after I quit giggling as I sent off my request. This was the same sort of decision making which led me to wear a shirt in middle school which read: Vote LV-426 Planet-Con in '86! (if you can determine what that statement refers to, bonus points.) Nonetheless, it was a bad decision, but it was MY bad decision, and I am sticking with it.

I'll keep you posted as to how this pans out. I need to call ADOT tomorrow to see what I'm supposed to do about this tag +/- plate debacle.

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