Conduits

We were going to go ride the Trek ride after I took a day off work to go deal with my car tags. Again.

I went last Monday, a day I took to recover from the wedding, and I got to the courthouse at 2:08 and was told I couldn't even get in line. They adopted a so-called upgrade and took a week off to train on it, but on top of the backlog that created, the upgrade doesn't really work.

I was going to ride my bike the courthouse, and I should have. I had this nagging doubt that I'd need the car, even though I bought it in-state, so no need to inspect the VIN. The courthouse is all of eleven blocks from home, so it's really too short to drive.

I got there when they opened, at 8:00, and was #25 in line.

At 10:00 a.m., I was going to go feed the meter, but someone (a civilian) told me they weren't really enforcing the meters because of the delays. Which makes sense, it's not my fault if some state employee sucks at their job.

By the time I actually had my tags, I emerged to find a curly ticket on my car window, and sure enough, they wrote me a $25 fine for the expired meter. Jackasses.

But there was another ticket, $125 for expired plates.

Some background: I bought this car person-to-person. No dealer, no 30-day tag. I made one, as I've seen others do, and a couple of weeks later I got pulled over. The cop told me you can't make your own 30-day tag even if you do, by law, have 30 days to register the car. He told me, and this is ridiculous but true, that I should have pulled the plate from my old car.

My old car, the one that was stolen in August and never recovered? All I need is a screwdriver and for the Kansas City, KS police to find my fucking car and I can move that puppy right over.

The homemade 30-day tag wasn't supposed to fix everything, but I figured it would prevent a stop or two. Once stopped, the fact that I had the title and bill of sale that showed I was clearly within the law would prevent an actual ticket. With a ticket issued anyway, I remembered I had a vanity plate from 2005 in my garage and I put that on the car with the 30-day sign to prevent another.

This tag, which I wouldn't have put on my car if a Gardner Public Safety cop didn't suck at his job, is what got me a ticket from the KCK police while I was getting my tags within the time frame allowed by law.

I went to the traffic division to argue my case, and they said the cop who wrote the ticket would call me. Which he did, while I was away from my phone, leaving a voicemail that he couldn't do anything for me, if I wanted a court date I'd have to go to the municipal court on the second floor.

I called that number and learned that they sometimes answer the phone on Monday but not usually. A guy at the 311 line with the same voice as the city's hold blurbs told me he'd do some research and transfer me to those same municipal support people, where I languished on hold for a full hour before they went home for the day without answering the pone.

So now I get to take two days off work to fight bullshit tickets. I'm faced with fines, basically, for not buying my car from a dealership.

I'd spent too much of the day dealing with the Kafka City, Kansas Unified Government to bother going in to work. And while it would have been fun to take Max on the Trek ride, we got side-tracked and wound up taking him to the conduit graveyard for some cool photographs and noshing on wild mulberries.