by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Some of the readers of this column have noted my commentary that I was leaving Florida.

Well, over a month ago, I did.

And, as is required by law everywhere, I changed my vehicle titles, registrations, and, of course, my Driver License.

All of these involved surrendering the former documents from Florida in exchange for the new ones.  Normal, standard procedure.  This isn’t the first time I’ve moved between states and I’ve never had anything odd happen before.

Until this time.

I get in the mail a document from the Florida Motor Vehicle folks threatening to suspend my Driver License because, get this — I canceled my car insurance.  Of course I did; car insurance is a state-specific thing and even though I didn’t change companies the policy is still re-issued in the new state when you move.

It gets better.

Florida of course sent this notice to my old address, and the USPS dutifully forwarded it to me, with it arriving here about a week later.  No big deal, right?  Well, not exactly — it’s quite the threatening letter, claiming that if I don’t respond with 10 days there is a $150 non-waivable “fine” to reinstate a credential that doesn’t exist.

Or does it?

I go online as Florida has an online Driver License validity checker.  It shows my license is still in their system and it’s valid.

Oh, and they’ll only take evidence of their ****-up by fax or postal mail.  There is no online portal where you can upload, say, a copy of your registration for said vehicle in the new state.  How many people still have a fax?

Further, do you really expect me to believe that if I was traveling in Florida and got pulled over by a cop that they couldn’t verify that my new state registration and driver license were both valid in seconds?  Is it that Florida can’t or, is it that they don’t want to?

I was tempted to tell them to blow goats but frankly, for the few bucks it’ll cost me at Staples to fax them, ok, I will, never mind that if you get actually get stopped and your Driver License is marked suspended, whether accurate or not, in most states that’s an instant trip to the lock-up and you cannot be bonded out until you see the Judge either.  Would I put it past Florida to stick that in their interlinked computer systems and have it flow through to another state?  Oh hell no.

Further all of this belies the utter stupidity of their systems and people because I own two cars and yet they were only complaining about one of them.  This implies they know the other title was surrendered and thus canceled.  It also implies that of the three documents in question — two titles and a Driver License — they only managed to correctly process one of the three.

How long would you last in private business if you only managed to handle one thing in three properly?  What if, when presented with evidence of this by the “customer” (cough-cough) instead of recognizing that you obviously ****ed up, going back and quickly checking what has to be possible for you to do right then and there while the customer is on the phone within seconds you instead pull some sort of procedural bull**** and demand the customer spend money to fix your ****-up?

Heh, I get it if there’s no evidence you want some.  Ok, so make it easy to submit it — you know, by upload or email right then and there?  When I ran MCSNet we occasionally screwed up posting payments.  Errors happen and I understand that.  If we cashed your check and you’ve got the canceled check in your hand well, you’re right and we’re wrong.  We’ll figure out how we ****ed up later and try to fix it but for right now your service is getting turned back on with an apology since unless you’ve forged that document the error is obviously ours.

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