You are what you drive?

Getting your car registered here in South Carolina is much more of a process than in Illinois. Just having to deal with the DMV and their limited hours was traumatic enough. But here, not only do you have to register your car, you have to pay property tax on it, plus you have to have all sorts of documentation to prove that you are who you are. I was able to get as far as paying the property tax within the week or two after I moved. But in order to get a SC driver's license I needed a copy of my birth certificate, and, lo and behold, that document evaporated in the move. So, because there is only one driver's license facility open on Saturdays in the entire county of Greenville, I decided to wait until I got my birth certificate in the mail to go back and get both my plate and my license, thus killing the proverbial two birds with one stone.

No big deal, right? But then there's the state of Illinois, from whom I had to request the copy of my birth certificate. To pay for it on line with a credit card, it would have been at my doorstep in about a week - for a total of about $40. But to snail mail a check and a hand-written form would only cost me $10, and I'd have it in 5 weeks. Makes no sense to me why the easier option for everyone is 3 times more expensive, but as I had just purchased a new house, I decided to take the $10 option and wait. This, my friends, is why I have been here for two-and-a-half months and just got my license and plate.

To have special plates made here is extremely expensive, unlike in Illinois where you get to make a request and as long as there's at least one number it's no different than getting regular plates. Therefore, as sad as I was to give them up, I sacrificed my ICTUS1 plates for the pre-printed South Carolina plates. In fact, they hand you your plate right at the counter from the top of a stack of ready-made plates, the numbers painted on instead of stamped in (looks kind of cheap, but whatever). So we got home and Josh excitedly replaced my old plates with my new one, making me an official South Carolinean.

So I've had the plate for a couple of weeks now, and it wasn't until the other night when we were out getting some ice cream that Josh commented on it:

"Hey, is that last letter a "d" or an "o?" he asked.

"I think it's a "d," I replied. "Why?"

And then I took the time to actually pay attention to the ID number that the State of South Carolina bestowed unto me:


Ha, ha. Very funny.