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Besides bills, bad news and begging letters, there is another type of old-fashioned mail that I can do without.
Communications from government offices.
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They seldom bring glad tidings, though I will not say never. Once a year, I have been getting something called a STAR payment. It’s a NY State thing, to do with property and school taxes and earning less than $500,000.
My STAR payment covers part of the school tax, but I don’t take it for granted and who knows if it will keep coming?
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Yesterday’s post brought a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles which described itself as a:
SUSPENSION ORDER
This puzzled me in a number of ways.
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For one thing, it said that I must IMMEDIATELY address this issue, but would be effective on 8th Jan ’25.
Reading further, I found I had two options:
Surrender my registration and license plates, or pay a civil penalty of $80.
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The old, tranquilized me would have immediately become agitated by this. Now a days, I’m off that stuff and simply asked: “What the hell are they on about?”
The DMV are claiming that the new car was driven while uninsured for a period of 10 days, which is false.
They advise me that they received this information from my insurance company, so that was the place to start. Luckily I was connected to someone who spoke clearly and understood exactly what I was talking about, although she could find no good reason why the situation had arisen.
They will send details to the DMV on my behalf to disprove the claim.
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These days you are conditioned to think scam, but it isn’t.
Do they assume that most people will choose to pay the civil penalty as the easiest option?
Well I’m not paying what I don’t owe and I am certainly not surrendering my registration. I am also not going to get excited about it.
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Having persuaded Grant that we could still drive the car, we went off to get his glasses sorted out. Problems with the new lenses.
In Greenwich the torn up pavement is being patched up, but I was only interested in that splendid cloud.
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Sadly, obstacles blocked the view.
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It seemed to promise a good storm, but nothing materialised.
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Bluster resolved.
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It faded into a gentle evening.
Thank you, Carolyn, for such a positive post! I admire your handling of officialdom. The cloud was extraordinary to look at and document for us in your photos.
Joanna
There seems to be a complete lack of common sense amongst “officials” now. They cannot think outside of the rulebook!
Over here, the DMV is called the DVLA. Any communication from them is always guaranteed to get me in a rage within 5 seconds. You did well to keep your cool, Carolyn.
Best wishes, Pete.