Two State bureaucracies vs. John Q. Public

This note has nothing to do with Mexico, but it too funny not to share. It was written by a retired machinist in Indiana who received a traffic ticket from New Jersey; he had never driven a vehicle in New Jersey. It describes one one those crazy real-life encounters that people sometimes have with governmental bureaucracies.

"Brazil" is the seat of Clay county in Indiana.

"Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 9:59 AM


It's been raining anvils on me.

I told you guys about getting three citations from the New Jersey Turnpike Authority for skipping tolls. So Tuesday, while in Terre Haute, I stopped by the western headquarters of the Indiana State Police. I had the citations with me and four fresh photographs of all my plated vehicles showing the make, color, model, and plates. I spoke with two ISP officers and they said there wasn't much they could do as they didn't have any jurisdiction in New Jersey. I pointed out that if the computers in Jersey talked with the computers in Indiana, and they gave the order to pull my driver's license for non-payment, they wouldn't NEED any jurisdiction in New Jersey. They could arrest me right here in Indiana, as I had no intention of quitting driving. They nodded and agreed that was true, but at least they had the decency to grin.

Indiana has damn good State Police. Keeping my temper in check, I asked them what their best advice was. We searched all over the citations and finally found a telephone number (non-toll free, of course). My only option was to call New Jersey, go through their endless telephone recording tree while paying long distance charges, and do my best to tell whoever I talked to that this must be a data entry mistake and to run the plate again. Although their grainy photos did indeed show an Indiana plate, it didn't match anything I had on my vehicles.

Wednesday morning I called them and went through all the BS and finally got a very bored human woman. I told her I did not skip paying any tolls as I had never been on their tollway, had never even been to New Jersey, and never owned a vehicle like the one in the photos. She asked me to hold for a moment. It was a long moment. Probably two or three dollars worth of moment. And some very bad elevator music.

She eventually came back on and said she was dismissing two of the citations but for one of them I need to send a "motor vehicle abstract" to them. A what? I'd never heard of such a thing. I asked her if she meant a copy of my vehicle titles, registrations, plate numbers, what? Very slowly, as if she was talking to a mentally challenged child, she said, "a...motor...vehicle...abstract."

I figured the terminology used in Indiana laws and New Jersey laws might be different.

Enough of this. I wrote down what she said and told her I was going to the local BMV and tell them what she said, ask for one, and mail it to her as quickly as possible. This seemed to satisfy her. We said goodbye and hung up.

I went to the Brazil BMV, as I had to go into town anyway, and caught them on a slow day. A woman motioned me over and said she could take me right now. (Indiana actually has a pretty good BMV too, vastly improved over the horrid mess it was years ago.) I had all the documents with me, the citations and the photos, and asked her if she'd heard her weird story for the day? This got a laugh and she said, "No, but something tells me you've got one."

I told her the whole nine yards. She also said she had no bloody idea what a "motor vehicle abstract" was and called over another woman. I showed them the citations. She got on her computer too look up the real owner of the plate, and start from there. In the meantime, the other woman and I scratched our heads and tried to figure out just exactly what the woman in New Jersey was talking about.

Presently, the first woman said, "Well, I found out who owns this plate." "Who?"

"You. Kent Ballard. And this plate gives the exact address where you live. It's you, all right." About this time, I could faintly hear the theme from "Twilight Zone." I blinked a couple of times and shoved the photos of my vehicles across the desk to her again. "None of them match. NONE of them. Look for yourself! None of the vehicles match, and none of the plates match!" They both looked again and agreed.

Still, her Indiana BMV computer said the mystery plate was mine. Then one of the women looked at the Jersey photos again. The tag number ended in the letter "D". She went off to get a massively thick log book of all letter designations on Indiana license plates. The other woman peered over her shoulder. I saw both their eyebrows raise at the same time. "Do you have a trailer?" "I have...two of them." We all looked at each other. "Is one of your trailers missing a plate?" "Hell, I dunno. They were there when I looked the last time."

They brought up more information via the computer. "Do you have a 12,000 pound gross weight trailer, a 2005 Liberty model?" "Yes, and I have a..." "This plate is for your Liberty trailer, the big 12,000 pounder. Yes, it's all here. Somebody in New Jersey is driving around with your trailer plate on their Suburban." I took a long, slow breath. "That can't be. I park that particular trailer next to my barn. I see that plate almost every day coming and going. I KNOW it's on the trailer." "Well, go home and check again. And if it's still there, go to your county's BMV, have them run it too, print out the info, and then go to your sheriff's department."

I left both angry and miserable. Had it been THEIR citations or one on the car of their husband or child, they'd have undoubtedly gotten on the telephone right there in the office, or brought up the Mojo Wire, as Hunter S. Thompson used to call the fledgling Internet, and called New Jersey themselves. But now the burden of proof was on me--and the clock was ticking. Also, going to my particular sheriff's department is...well... an experience in High Strangeness regardless if you're guilty of anything or not.

Other local county sheriff's departments make jokes about ours. Generally dark ones. They say it's the longest-running family owned business in Parke County, among worse things. Thursday I was busy cramming 21st Century mechanical computer codes into my Model 1953 brain, as my final in CNC coding school was that night. I would not settle for just a good grade, I wanted to ace the thing. A future job could depend on it. I already have a Jounreyman's card as a machinist, once considered the A-ticket to any job concerning industrial machinery. Then some damned fool got the bright idea to attach computers and robotic motors to the gizmos and now you have to be skilled not only in transferring blueprints into three dimensional solid objects, cutting, drilling, tapping, and forming steel, you have to be Scotty from Star Trek and do it all using a bloody computer. What has this world come to?

The only time I went outside was to check the plate on my big trailer, make sure it was still there, and photograph it from two different rear angles. So I studied all day, went to class and did in fact ace the test, getting a nice piece of paper saying I was fully qualified to do on a screen what I'd been doing manually for decades, and came home that night (The next advanced class starts next month. Imagine my joy.)

Friday when I walked into the BMV in Rockville, the quaint tourist-trap town that's my county seat; I was pleased to see they had no customers at all. Good. I had the whole place to myself, and would probably need it. I sat down and began going over everything with a young lady when another woman overheard what I was saying. She ambled over and took interest in my problem. I didn't find out until a few minutes later that she was the head of this particular BMV, and it was only a couple of minutes after that I realized she was also very probably the most intelligent person in the county. Things began to look up suddenly.

She said Indiana had a glitch two years ago. Somehow they'd made hundreds of extra Indiana license plates and sent them to wrong addresses all over the nation. (This is why we have a much better BMV now. After that fiasco, they performed a Spanish Inquisition on the bureau and everyone remotely connected with it and fired about half the force, and totally retrained the rest to switch over to a completely computerized force. It worked. It saves Hoosiers both money and time and now a mistake within the BMV is nearly unheard of, a far cry from the morass they were not long ago.)

But the damage had been done. While most of the recipients of the plates obeyed follow-up notices to destroy the plates, some of them fell into the hands of people who could use a nice, new illegal license plate and promptly put them to good use, for themselves. Soon Hoosiers all over the state were reporting getting speeding tickets from Arizona, double-parking fines from Vermont, all kinds of legal notices from almost all fifty states. They'd needed to set up--and maintain--a complete office at the Indiana BMV headquarters in Indianapolis to deal with these and battle the bureaucracies that were the BMV's all across America.

With both courtesy and the efficiency of a computer herself, the woman took all my paperwork and made copies in triplicate, including the photos of my vehicles and trailers I had taken, and came back with a sheet of paper giving me instructions on how to proceed. They still had a stack of them in the office. That's how bad the problem had become. She instructed me to write a letter saying everything I had told her, including the fact that I had never even been to New Jersey, let alone on the Turnpike, had sure as hell never driven through the Lincoln Tunnel, also point out that this was an illegal Indiana plate to boot, and send one copy to the special unit in Indianapolis and one copy to the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. Indiana would THEN go to battle for it's poor, wrongly accused son.

I thought about asking her if we could summon up the Indiana National Air Guard to take their F-16s, fly at supersonic speed to the Turnpike, and plant a 500 pound bomb on it every quarter-mile, but decided not to. Besides, those people and planes are tied up elsewhere in the world right now. This would be good enough, finally getting my own state on my side.

After a bit more conversation, we both decided to send the letter to New Jersey overnight AND as registered mail, forcing someone over there to sign for it when they accepted it. We weren't saying anyone over there was crooked, mind you, just that it would be a good idea for me to have legal proof that such a letter was indeed sent and received.

Well. Good enough.

This visit and the kind woman had served me well. Now, off to the shining new dungeon which is the Parke County Sheriff's Office with it's bleak and blank entrance where you speak to a black wall of glass and are eventually answered by a disembodied voice from an overhead speaker... "Why go there?", the woman asked. "There's nothing to be gained from that. They don't have a hand in this. WE do. You don't need to go to the Sheriff's Office unless you have other business. "I quickly assured her I had no other need for Parke County's Finest (ahem) and would like to keep as many miles from that place and me as possible, but the girl down in Brazil said I should. She made a sour face. "Brazil. It figures. They don't know anything down there. We get a dozen phone calls a week from them wanting us--me, actually--to bail them out of some simple problem. Forget the Sheriff. You don't need him for anything. Besides, he has absolutely no power or jurisdiction over this matter anyway. This is a state-to-state affair. You send those letters and we'll take it from there. "I could not thank that woman enough. I wanted to buy her flowers.

I left Rockville's BMV a new man, completely refreshed in the knowledge that there was, in fact, intelligent life in Parke County.

The letters will be sent tomorrow as soon as the local Post Office opens. I hope to hear no more from the State of New Jersey, or the mysterious bastard driving around on a fake Indiana tag with my number on it. With luck, it was a stolen vehicle anyway and the Mafia will run it--and the dead bodies in the back--through a car crusher and the whole mess will be melted into molten steel with which to make new shotguns or something else useful. It's bad enough trying to wrangle your way out of trouble that you actually did cause. Trying to prove you're innocent when you ARE innocent is just as much trouble, I've found. May this never happen to you.

Kent"