Comment on Insuranace is a joke

• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  LOL, I get you! But at the day-to-day bureaucrat level, there’s no, “Let me talk to your manager!” The rules are the rules, no matter if they’re insane in your particular case, the bureaucrat cannot make exceptions. Which is my pet theory as to why so many hate the government.

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  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Sometimes the rules are just dumb.

    Ooh I’ve got a couple fun “fucking bureaucracy” stories with the MA RMV and the RI DMV…

    I bought a car in MA in 2014. Lived in RI at the time. Registered it in RI, paid RI sales tax at the dealer to register it. As one does. You cannot register a car without paying the tax.

    Owned it for 4 or 5 years when I moved to MA. When I tried to register it here, they wanted me to pay sales tax on the original purchase price in MA. That’s the law, unless I could prove that I paid RI sales tax.

    “It was registered in RI by the dealer, ipso facto I must’ve paid tax” wasn’t enough. I needed a form from the dealer.

    I had my original paperwork all in a file at home. None of the documents were what they were looking for.

    The dealership was still there, but had changed hands in the interim. I called every day for like 2 weeks trying to see if they could find the form. “We will give you a call in the morning”. I had to call them in the afternoon because they never called me.

    Eventually, I’m pretty sure they just forged the form to get me to stop calling them. Whatever, it was enough to let me register the car without paying tax on a 6 year old car, based on the value of when it was 1 year old.

    ---

    When I was a teen, my dad bought an old Datsun off some guy off Craigslist as a project car. It wasn’t even in one piece. It was immobile, hadn’t been started in years. Squirrel den. Came with about 3 pallets stacked a good 4-5 feet high full of parts.

    It was an antique (by state law, 25 years old) when he bought it. I’m pretty sure when we bought it, the law was that cars over 10 years old could be registered without a title. I may be mistaken.

    This car…did not have a title. And it was not at all road-worthy, so registering it was never on his radar.

    We worked on it for quite a while over the course of…probably a couple of years. Eventually got it quite road worthy and street legal and looking quite good.

    By the time we went to register it, though, the title was now needed. The bill of sale from prior to that law didn’t matter. Title was necessary.

    The guy that he bought the car from was dead. Like, actually dead, we tried to track him down to see if possibly he had it, and all we could find was his obit.

    So now he has this car with a couple of years of our blood, sweat, and tears in it…and the DMV is saying it can’t be driven.

    I’m not really sure how he ended up resolving that. I think he just shared his story with enough of his circle (pre-Facebook) that he found “a guy who knows a guy” who helped him grease the right palms. Typical Rhode Island.

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      SEE! People hate the government because they cut no slack, no matter how dumb the situation. They can’t, gotta follow the law no matter what.

      Got a boat out front, lost the paper title before I registered it. Now it’s a $4,000 paperweight. Not nearly as bad as your story!

      I called a few times, “Nothing we can do.” FFS, I could file a “lost title” in other states I’ve lived in. Anyway, I’m paying a guy $200 to polish it up, dumping it on FB Marketplace for whatever I can get.

      Trying to get a power pole put in at my camp in the boonies. Have to deal with the Health Department. WTF? Been round and round, apparently there’s one woman I have to talk to, no one else has the authority to talk about this normal thing.

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