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Back in college I got pulled over for expired license plates (had moved, forgot to update my address with the DMV), and the officer took away the plates because
by zdw 4y ago
Back in college I got pulled over for expired license plates (had moved, forgot to update my address with the DMV), and the officer took away the plates because my car apparently didn't have insurance.
Of course, I had insurance, but due to the lack of this particular checksum algorithm somewhere during data entry process my insurance carrier had transposed a 7 for an I, and thus the VIN on the vehicle did not match the VIN that was insured.
After fixing it with the insurance company, I had to go to traffic court to get the ticket dealt with. The judge in this case questioned why I didn't check that they matched when I first got insurance - as a response I asked the judge if they had also checked this on their own car. The case was dismssed.
- fzliu 4y agoI'm always amazed by the lack of tech saviness in a lot of "traditional" industries.
- zdw 4y agoThis was about 2 decades ago, so not particularly surprising given that the insurance office still used text-based terminals and who knows what on the backend.
- SoftTalker 4y agoProbably the same backend they are using today, judging by what I saw last time I was in my insurance agent's office.
- wongarsu 4y agoBut their text terminal is probably faster and more reliable than the web app that will eventually replace it.
- kube-system 4y agoTech saviness was the problem. Computers will always tell you that two unequal strings are unequal. If the cop had instead relied on paper proof of insurance, they probably wouldn’t have noticed a single digit VIN typo either. They would have seen that the make/model/driver matches and checked for valid effective dates.